How does Australia’s Covid death rate and hospitalisations compare with other countries?

Australia is nearing the numbers of Covid hospitalisations and daily deaths it saw in the January peak. But Australia is just one of many countries that appear to be caught in a series of rolling Covid waves.

There are currently more than 207 people in hospital for every million Australians. Belgium, France, Spain and the United Kingdom all have similar numbers, and many other countries are seeing increasing hospitalisations. Most of the OECD appears to be either coming off a recent wave or in the midst of one. And only a few of them are currently in winter.

There are many reasons why Covid is spreading more “successfully”, according to Professor Maximilian de Courten, director of the Mitchell Institute at Victoria University. These include the virus mutating to spread better, the timing of vaccination drives, alongside fatigue among the public, politicians and media for preventative measures such as wearing face masks.

For most of the pandemic, Australia had far fewer hospitalisations and deaths than comparable countries. Some OECD countries have seen double or even triple the number of hospitalisations per million as Australia’s peak. Until the Delta wave in late 2021, Australia was one of few countries with fewer deaths throughout the pandemic than would be expected based on previous trends, known as “excess deaths”.

New Zealand is now the only country in the OECD with negative excess deaths, according to a model created by the Economist. Based on current trends that might not last long.

Australia has now seen over 15,000 excess deaths over the course of the pandemic, according to the model, and the trend is going up. The vast majority of Covid deaths in Australia have been this year.

Comparing data across countries and even time can be problematic as policies and definitions aren’t uniform. Queensland, for instance, previously had a policy of admitting all positive coronavirus cases to hospital. De Courten says hospitalisations are a far more reliable indicator than case numbers. They are also more pertinent to policymaking.

“What should drive decisions is how long the health service can cope with the load.”

At over 5,300 people currently in hospitals with Covid, De Courten says the Australian health system is “being overrun”. Data from Our World in Data shows hospitalisations in much of the OECD is trending upwards, including in Australia.

Even with huge numbers of infections, Australia still isn’t seeing the levels of hospitalisations and deaths many comparable countries had earlier in the pandemic.

The United Kingdom got up to 583 hospitalisations per million in January 2021, the United States saw highs of 458, Poland 910 and Hungary over 1,200. Australia’s current peak is over 207.

You can see the peak number of hospitalisations for each OECD country in the data below, as well as the latest data on deaths, excess deaths and total vaccinations.

But the number of people in hospital with Covid is just the tip of the iceberg. As Covid hospitalisations increase, it strains other areas of the health system.

“It not only about direct Covid cases. Especially at the level of hospital overload. [It’s also about] the non-Covid health issues that need urgent attention – the heart attacks, the strokes; the chronic hip and knee replacements and elective surgeries,” says De Courten.

“The health system is the health system. It’s not the Covid system. We don’t have it separated. If the health system is under strain it impacts all the other diseases [and health conditions].”

Notes and methods:

• Many countries only report data sporadically and others have stopped some reporting entirely.

• Some gaps also exist because of inconsistent reporting

• Missing values have been filled using linear interpolation only where there are gaps between points, without projecting forward.