Australian Provisional Mortality Data January - May 2025 Shows Overall Deaths Lower than 2023 and 2024 levels but Higher than Pre-pandemic levels. Older folk continue to fare far worse than younger!
Births to end of 2024 are stable, but shouldn't be. Births should be growing with the addition of 1.309 million persons via net migration from 2021 to 2024. Stable births = declining fertility rates.
ABS has released Jan-May provisional mortality last 29 August, providing first data for April (14,348) and May (15,685) 2025 and 394 late registered deaths for January to March.
I didn’t rush with publishing a stack as the data doesn’t show significant changes from 2024 prior trending.
Overall mortality for Jan - May 2025 is still running well above pre-pandemic and 2020 and 2021 levels but is lower than the most recent 3 years (2022 - 2024). It is somewhat reassuring for now that peak deaths have slowed down in early 2025.
The step change in registered deaths from pre-vaccine to post-vaccine rollouts is even clearer with registered weekly deaths plotted over time.
By age breakdowns of deaths is somewhat reassuring in that deaths among younger folk seem to have reverted to similar to pre-pandemic levels. Deaths among folks aged 45-64 was running low during the summer months but rise as Australia headed into winter, always a hard time for vulnerable people, and particularly cold in 2025.
Deaths among older people are still high and remain in the upper half of the step change that occurred following Covid-19 vaccines rollout. Deaths among those aged 75-85 remain notably high; indicating that deaths are likely occurring early than they otherwise would have. The beginning of the winter death-spike can be observed among seniors.
Deaths by age and across time with trendlines are also presented.
Births and Migration
2024 birth data is available from national, state and territory population release.
Australia’s birth rates have been quite stable over time, hovering between 293,000 and 312,000 between 2007 to 2020. After peaking at 315,200 in 2021, likely a natural consequence of the population being under stay-at-home orders in 2020, births dropped to 281,800 in 2021 (families already had their baby) but rose again to 294,600 in 2023 and 298,100 in 2024.
Stable births in a population are good for planning and services provision. However, this also needs to be observed in the context of Australia’s migration driven-population growth.
Between 2007 and 2024, Australia’s population grew from 21.016 million to 27.4 million, an increase of 30.4%. The median age of migrants arriving to Australia in 2023-2024, the same as pre-pandemic 2018-2019, was 26 - 28, which is well within reproductive age. If the population is swelling with mostly young migrants1 and birth rates are staying stable / slightly dropping, this indicates that overall annual birth rates are dropping. Indeed, births only rose by 1.7% between 2007 and 2024; with annual births / 1000 population having dropped from 14.0 to 10.9. The population growing by 30.4% but births only increasing by 1.7% between 2007 and 2024, indicates a dramatic decline in births, despite stable absolute birth numbers.
Age distribution of Australia’s population as of 30 June 2024 is shown. The largest cohorts are still within reproductive age for another 10 years or so. However, if Australia doesn’t reverse its birth declines in that time (challenging indeed given current social, political, economic and trust in government and the future issues; which are critical for people to want to have children) (and to want to migrate to Australia), it may well be irreversible. Never mind the added issues of infertility, loss of fecundity, and increased mortality across all ages which will accelerate population losses!
Natural population increase is declining slowly, mostly driven by rising deaths, births propped up and buffered from the steep declines seen in many places by migration. Natural population growth (births - deaths) has dropped from 153,400 in 2007 to 110,800 in 2024.
The next VS deaths update will be in 3 months and will contain winter data, the typical peak death period, which will be revealing on how the population is doing.
Meanwhile I now have immediate family members in Australia with serious health conditions and unexpected and aggressive cancers, and friends experiencing the same in their families. The fallout from the Covid-19 vaccines is in full swing.
A portion of migrants are temporary and in Australia for study. Some students go on to work in Australia and eventually become citizens. Net migration figures capture both arrivals and departures, to show migrant driven population growth over time.
Great post Super Sally. All the graphs I look at for the United States do clearly show more death in winter, especially January. Your explanation sounds more than plausible. I think that the perpetrators of this democide were crafty and planned many of the vaccine rollouts for winter, to hide in the normal upswing of mortality some of the carnage.
aged death spike pre-winter - I wonder what factor flu jabs have in that? Is it a 'natural' accepted occurrence or an induced one that has become normalised? My father always said that more elderly died in the heat of summer than winter in Oz?