A Closer Look At Respiratory Death (part 4)

Lessons from an undisclosed NHS Trust

By now readers of this series should have realised that ascribing causality to death is more akin to a mirage than a tangible reality and that medical subtlety is being brushed aside in a bid to a stamp everything with a COVID sticker.

I’ve established an indicator for symptomatic and asymptomatic COVID death and it will be interesting to see how this pans out in time series analysis. Before we do that we need to establish that the weekly trend in all cause deaths in the NHS Trust under study is representative of the weekly trend in registered all cause deaths across England and Wales.

To do this I downloaded weekly registered all cause deaths from the ONS website and subtracted deaths for the two youngest age groups of age 0y and age 1 – 14y, this being a reasonable match for my definition of adult (>=18y). The weekly data series for all cause in-hospital deaths within the Trust and the ONS all cause series for registered deaths for the period 2017/w1 to 2021/w37 were then subject to Z…