ABC News, one of the leading news media in Australia, recently published an article titled ‘Life. Death. COVID-19’ to mark two years since the first reported COVID-19 death in the country.
While acknowledging that thousands of Australians have already lost their lives to COVID-19, the article presents a balanced debate on how much death Australia is willing to accept as the country is moving towards “living with the virus”.
The article includes an interview with Australian C-MOR partner, Professor Catherine Bennett, head of epidemiology at Deakin University, who presented data published by the C-MOR international team. More specifically, the article presents an interactive graph comparing the 2015-2019 average mortality rate to the mortality rate observed during 2020, to demonstrate that the vast majority of countries included in the C-MOR team, experienced significant excess deaths during the first months of the pandemic.
The thought-provoking article and the graph produced using data from the C-MOR consortium – titled “2020 mortality rate vs. 2015–2019 range” – can be accessed through the following link: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-03-08/australia-covid-19-deaths-and-mortality/100857462