April 1977 & April 2020
Exploring peculiar hikes in monthly excess non-COVID mortality in England & Wales (rev 1.1)
By now it should be abundantly clear to subscribers that something highly peculiar was going on during April 2020. We may try and pin the blame on false negative test results but this doesn’t explain why this problem only reared its head in April, and then among older females. A false negative is a false negative and test performance (sensitivity/specificity) is not going to be age and gender specific unless we have designed a magic test. Neither does this strained argument consider that we are talking physician-certified death certificates upon which more than a mere test result hangs.
On top of this there’s the peculiar finding of a similar inexplicable hike in excess age and gender standardised mortality April 1977, and this prompted me to do a bit more ARIMA modelling to see how the two anomalous Aprils came out in the wash.
What I’ve baked up this morning is automated ARIMA modelling of monthly excess non-COVID mortality by quinary age group and gender for the period Jan 1975 – Dec 2021 using dummy indicator variables (regressors) for April 1977 and April 2021 to see who was experiencing a hit on health during these two periods. The results are somewhat intriguing and I shall reveal them using a simple summary table instead of churning out piles of statistical output.
The column headed ‘Estimate’ tells us how big the impact was in terms of surplus excess deaths per 100k of the target population and the column headed ‘Sig.’ tells us what confidence we may attach to this estimate. The queer number of 0.000 for 85+y females for April 2020 is a rounding thingy, the actual p-value reaching a minuscule p=0.0000001 (in betting lingo we are talking odds of 10 million to 1 against this being a chance result).
We see that April 1977 was a problematic month for most of the adult population and I am putting my money on a particularly nasty strain of influenza. In contrast April 2020 only crops up for the most elderly females; whatever was going on for this subgroup was extremely vicious compared to 1977. There is no way this astonishing result can be pinned on SARS-COV-2 because it is too selective, besides which we have April 1977 for comparison to see what a virus will do.
Something killed granny back in April 2020 and it wasn’t a virus.
I may be reaching a bit, but here goes …. Vast majority of seniors in care home settings are female. That’s not a guess, I was a safeguard officer for older adults and it’s simply a fact. I don’t know that national stats but my best guesstimate based on my experience is easily 80% are ladies in these settings. Just a thought.
Yes, it was Matt Hancock.