ARIMA modelling of age & sex standardised monthly non-COVID mortality 1970 – 2021
Things that go bump in the night (rev 1.0)
Back on 6th June in this newsletter I mentioned my rummaging about in ONS’ pantry for data that enabled me to calculate non-COVID age & sex adjusted mortality (a.k.a. AGAM). A couple of slides were produced and we compared this time series with that for all cause death to reveal the impact of COVID-19 in Apr 2020 and Jan 2021. This morning in an idle moment I ran an ARIMA model over the non-COVID time series, the results of which left my eyebrows on the ceiling.
Whilst we may expect the outlier months of Apr 2020 and Jan 2021 as folk fell foul of SARS-COV-2 peak infection we don’t expect outlier months for folk not falling foul of SARS-COV-2; it should be the sorry business of death pretty much as usual, and especially so if we assume lockdown and other factors (like lack of routine healthcare services and closure of primary care) didn’t really kill people.
Well that ain’t necessarily so, sang Sportin’ Life, the drug dealer in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess.
I say this because in that idle m…
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