Provisional weekly death counts: Interactive tool

Additional information

The dashboard presents data that are relevant for monitoring the impacts of COVID-19 on mortality in Canada. It includes the latest weekly death data and historical weekly death data back to 2014 from the Canadian Vital Statistics: Death database (CVS:D). The CVS:D is an administrative survey that collects demographic and medical (cause of death) information from all provincial and territorial vital statistics registries on all deaths in Canada.

With this tool, data users can explore current and historical weekly trends of deaths for each province and territory. Key variables such as age group and sex are also presented in interactive charts.

The interactive tool allows users to examine excess deaths by comparing the trend in weekly deaths in 2020 to the trends in weekly deaths in previous years.

“Week 53, January 2014” refers to the week beginning December 28, 2014 and ending January 3, 2015.

2017 to 2020 data for Yukon are not available.

More information on these data can be found in the footnotes for table 13-10-0768-01.

Definitions

Weeks are as defined in several epidemiological studies, including those of the United States Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention (CDC). CDC weeks start on a Sunday and end on a Saturday. They are numbered sequentially from 1 to 52 or 53 depending on the year. The first CDC week in a year ends on the first Saturday of January, provided it has at least four days in that calendar year. The first CDC week of a year may include a few days from the previous calendar year. Conversely, the first few days of a calendar year may be included in the last CDC week of the previous year. Since CDC weeks can overlap two months, they do not perfectly recreate calendar months or years.