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Demographers have been at the forefront of academic research about the burden of new coronavirus disease (COVID-19). Since the early work of Dowd et al. (2020), demographic research has identified the role of population age structure for understanding levels and differentials of COVID-19 fatality (Dudel et al., 2020; Medford & Trias-Llimòs, 2020). This is because the age gradient of COVID19 mortality is at least as steep as that of all-cause mortality, causing a greater concentration of deaths in old age (Goldstein & Lee, 2020; Guilmoto, 2020). Sex differentials in COVID-19 mortality are also more pronounced than all-cause mortality: COVID-19 mortality rates of men aged 25–80 have been found to be greater than those of women (Geldseltzer et al., 2021; Guilmoto, 2020), because of a combination of biological and behavioral factors (Cai, 2020; Falahi and Kenarkoohi, 2020; Gebhard et al., 2020; Klein et al., 2020; Scully et al., 2020; Takahashi et al., 2020). Finally, by recognizing the role of basic demographic characteristics for COVID-19 severe outcomes, demographers have directly contributed to improvements in data collection (Riffe et al., 2021), and the evaluation of existing data sources for mortality analysis (Garcia et al., 2021). These contributions complemented epidemiological assessments of COVID-19 and demonstrated the importance of including demographic features in research about the pandemic. Canada has been largely absent from comparative demographic studies about COVID-19 mortality and morbidity (Bignami, in this issue). In this Editorial, we