In 2020, New Zealand reported one of the lowest covid-19 mortality rates in the world, registering five deaths per million or just 25 total from the island nation’s 5 million residents. Not only did they post very low covid deaths, but also very low overall deaths in its elderly population.

In this post, I compare deaths in New Zealand in 2021 to 2020. As I will show, age-adjusted mortality rate has increased more than 6% in the first two months of 2021 over the expected number. The following steps are taken to reach the conclusion:

• Calculating mortality rate by age
• Modeling 2021 deaths