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Photo by Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press

So does a common error the BBC fell into. It said CFR “describes how many people doctors can be sure are killed by the infection.” Not even close. The number of people who die after testing positive for diabetes tells you nothing about how many people doctors are sure were killed by it. Many die from cancer, accidents, infection or multiple comorbid causes.

So CFR is too high because someone with terminal cancer and chronic emphysema who dies with COVID-19 certainly didn’t die of it alone even if it hastened their death. But it’s also too low because if an accident victim bleeds to death because the ER is overwhelmed by pandemic cases, they died of COVID-19 without getting it. (And because doctors rushing to save the sick won’t test everyone who dies.)

Another problem with CFR, and even IFR, is they don’t reveal who it’s killing. But just as there’s a reason for labels telling pregnant women not to drink, sometimes you quarantine retirement residences not an entire society.

It’s not just illness that kills people. The actuarial data tell us poverty, despair and loneliness kill too. John Robson

Do these soft numbers mean we know nothing? No. We have one number that’s both hard and informative: “excess deaths.” Every death may be a tragedy, except those bringing release from intolerable suffering. But every death is also inevitable and while individual ones are largely unpredictable, actuaries know the aggregate numbers with eerie accuracy.

Statistics Canada’s table 13-10-0708-01 doesn’t just list annual deaths. It says 10 per cent happen in January and under eight per cent in June and July. Nationally it’s around 300,000 a year, and in Ontario around 110,000. One way or another, about 25,000 people a month would normally shuffle off the Canadian coil, 820 a day, and in Ontario those numbers would be 9,100 and 300. If significantly more die this month, it shows the impact of the pandemic. So when officials project between 200 to 6,000 pandemic deaths in Ontario by April 30, you see that the former would be unfortunate, the latter catastrophic.