1/ As Australia celebrates "zero-Covid" it is interesting to compare them to Ireland.
Ireland is considered to have had moderate impact from Covid.
1,915 deaths translates to 386 deaths per million and puts us 27th on the list of affected countries. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-54768038

2/ Australia, in contrast, has had just 907 deaths which translates to a mere 35 deaths per million. Generally, they are considered to have fared very well and are way down in 118th place.

But what if we look at all cause mortality for each country?

3/ For the period Jan-Jul 2020, Australia has a provisional total of 79,878 deaths. Their 5 year average for that period is 79,590.
So, as expected for a country that successfully suppressed a deadly virus, their deaths are close to their average. Just 288 deaths above average.

4/ Ireland, for the same period, has a provisional total of 17,741 deaths. Our 5 year average for that period is 18,379. That means there is 638 less deaths than average this year in Ireland.

5/ How does Ireland, a country with a significant Covid death rate (386 per m), end up with a significantly smaller all cause excess death rate than Australia, a country with a tiny Covid death rate (35 per m)?

6/ Zero-Covid supporters in Ireland want us to replicate Australia's approach but to what end? We're already doing better than them in terms of overall deaths compared to average.
What value is there is achieving zero cases if it doesn't translate into fewer lives lost?

7/ If nothing else, this is evidence that the majority of people dying of Covid in Ireland were people who were sadly going to die this year anyway.
Covid 19 is just a labelling exercise. More people who died in Ireland this year got that label than they did in Australia.

8/ The only value in suppressing cases would be to make it less easy to label deaths as Covid. That's what less cases in Australia amounted to.
But the same overall amount of people would still be dying. So what's the point?

9/ Australia only did better than Ireland in looking after the health of its citizens if you use just one narrow metric (Covid Deaths). And narrow metrics have been the root of the problem behind this whole mess.

Look at the big picture and you can see how insignificant Covid is

10/ Sources:
Australia: https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/health/causes-death/provisional-mortality-statistics/latest-release

Ireland: https://twitter.com/GrahamNeary/status/1317880308344213505?s=20

Graph from Tweet 9: https://twitter.com/kilkelly/status/1315369656430063616?s=20

*Mortality figures for both countries are provisional and may increase slightly.