Covid statistics
Martin Lally has done an analysis of some of the Covid statistics we all heard about, and I am publishing some extracts from it below with some comments from me.
One of the most dramatic piece of information in the early stages of the pandemic was the widely-cited figure of 80,000 deaths if we did not lockdown. This came from Table 2 of Prof Shaun Hendy’s March 2020 paper, which provides a figure of 83,000 under a “No Control” situation.
At the right hand end of the “No Control” row, the figure of 1.67% appears in brackets, which means the death rate and 1.67% of NZ’s population then (about 5 million) was 83,000. Since the other rows of the table are control strategies by government, a reasonable interpretation of the phrase “No Control” by a person not acquainted with the technical details of the paper but fluent in English (such as a journalist) would be “no government controls”. However, in a recent book (“The Covid Response”), Hendy explains that it actually meant no government imposed controls and people behaving “as if covid was just a regular flu”, i.e., people not reacting to the spread of covid (page 87). The latter is inconceivable because a covid death toll reaching even a few thousand would have triggered people to take protective actions, especially with government and the media giving such attention to the matter. At the time, I understood the 83,000 figure to be deaths if there were no government controls and no reaction by the populace, and therefore thought Hendy’s presentation of the figure without the crucial additional premise was a mistake. It was rather like him predicting how many people would die in a tall building if it were hit in the upper floors by an aircraft and nobody reacted by vacating the building, with each person going about their work until the smoke and flames engulfed them or the top stories collapsed onto them. In his recent book, Hendy could have just conceded that the omission of the additional premise led the media to draw the wrong conclusion, and therefore it was a mistake by him to fail to add the additional premise, but he doesn’t. Instead, he blames the media for misunderstanding the figure (page 87). It is rather like opening the floodgates and then blaming the water for obeying the law of gravity.
This is quite stunning. I suspect we all thought the 80,000 figure was based on no action by the government. But in fact it was based on the population acting like zombies and not making any personal behavioural changes.
Hendy (pages 123 and 146 of his book) expresses the widely-expressed view that the Maori and Pasifika communities suffered disproportionately from covid. The plain English meaning of this claim is that the covid death rate for these two communities was higher than for the country in toto. However, this is not true. Ministry of Health data on the deaths from covid by ethnicity and age group are presented at the below weblink.
The last table at this link reports 2,982 covid deaths to date, including 235 Maori and 131 Pasifika. At the 2023 census, the population in toto was 4,994,000 including 887,000 Maori and 443,000 Pasifika: see Table 9 at
So the overall covid death rate was 0.06%, that for Maori was 0.026%, and that for Pasifika 0.03%. So, overall Maori and Pasifika covid death rates were only half or less than the rate for the whole population. The reason for this seems clear: most of the covid deaths were in the 80+ group and Maori and Pasifika had relatively low percentages of their populations in this 80+ group (1.1% for Maori and 0.9% for Pasifika versus 4.0% in the whole population). By analogy, if covid death rates were particularly high in people with blue eyes, Maori and Pasifika would also suffer much less than proportionately.
Perhaps those who claim Maori and Pasifika suffered disproportionately actually mean that they suffered so within each age group rather than in toto. However, even this is not true for Maori in the 80+ group (which contains over 70% of the total covid deaths). In this 80+ group, there were 2,111 covid deaths including 88 Maori (data source as above). In addition, the 80+ population in the 2023 census was 199,023 including 9,333 Maori (data source as above) So, for this 80+ age group, the overall covid death rate was 1.06% versus 0.94% for Maori. So, for this age group, the Maori rate is again below the overall rate.
So it seems very clear that fewer Maori died proportionally than non-Maori.
Martin was interviewed on RCR about his analysis, which has links to all the papers.