An Enigma: Transmission Of Epidemic Influenza (part 2)

I attempt to shed light on the riddle that is seasonal influenza using my bag of spanners. Today I take a look at the range of available diagnoses 1901 - 2000

It made an awful lot of sense to me to turn to the Office for National Statistics to see what data they held on influenza, so I headed for the main landing page and stuffed INFLUENZA into the new beta search results page. I came away with 166 data sets that I carefully worked through to see if any met my basic criteria of offering a time series (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or annual) of counts of something to do with influenza that dated back at least 50 years.

My eyeballs met with a lot of death series amongst those 166 data sets, most of which were concerned the COVID era, as may be expected. A paltry table of annual counts going back from 2000 to 1994 was the best I could scrape together, with another pathetic spreadsheet offering annual counts by age band for the period 2001 – 2021. Harumph!

It was then that I stumbled across a beefy spreadsheet of registered deaths by ICD10 code, age, sex and year but only for the period 2001 – 2022. Still, that will come in very handy indeed…