Age & sex standardised monthly non-COVID mortality 1970 – 2021

Another look at the monthly series for England & Wales (rev 1.0)

Back on 27th May I took a quick look at age & sex standardised all cause mortality (a.k.a. AGAM) for England & Wales for the period Jan 1970 – Dec 2021. I remarked that the overall decline over time wasn’t exactly new news, neither was the repetitive seasonality that turned this series into an alligator jaw. What was relatively new news was that our alligator had only two sharp front teeth, these being Apr 2020 and Jan 2021. This morning I wondered what the time series would look like if we pulled those two front teeth out.

I have thus spent a while trawling through the ONS website gathering data on deaths due to COVID by age and month, and came across this fabulous spreadsheet. This allowed me to derive counts of COVID deaths by quinary age band but not by sex, so I had to do some fiddling using mortality rates provided by the ONS in this spreadsheet. A couple of pots of tea later and I had reasonable estimates of deaths due to COVID by quinary age band and sex for the period Mar 2020…