COVID & non-COVID Care Home Deaths By Region (part 1)

Regional analysis of weekly COVID & non-COVID care home deaths in England & Wales 2020-2022 (rev 1.2)

This morning we are going to take a closer look at the first wave of an alleged novel virus as it swept through the care homes of England & Wales. Before we do this we need to understand that the data I am throwing about are deaths by date of registration and not by date of death. The Office for National Statistics prefer to produce tables by date of registration, yet at the same time they acknowledge issues arising from administrative delays, which seems a trifle bonkers to me. When pressed on the matter here’s what an officer had to say…

Legally a person has 5 days to register a death with the General Register Office. These registrations come through to ONS on a daily basis where they are loaded on to our system for validation and coding. Some deaths are registered weeks or even months after the date of death; see our report on registration delays here which gives more detail on why these delays occur.

An occurrence and registration week for deaths begins each Saturday and runs to the following Friday. Around 46% of deaths are registered in the same week of occurrence. This raises to 85% on average by the end of the following week. Thus, if there are 10,000 deaths in a given week, we expect that 4,600 (46%) are registered that week and another 3,900 (total 85%) by the following week.

In our weekly deaths dataset we produce figures for registrations. We produce these splits by sex and age based on registration because it is a more complete form of data which is derived from the death certificate. Therefore, as the data is in a provisional state, we are able to provide more accurate analysis.

We can produce analysis based on occurrences, and we have produced several back series of data based on occurrences. We are able to produce bespoke requests for general public, so long as they adhere to our disclosure control policy and subject to agreement of costs. As there is a legal gateway to access data via a bespoke route, the FOI would align to this method of data access.

The fact that the ONS tenaciously stick to date of registration data and have done since the year dot would suggest to me that they are confident that delays are not significant and unlikely to skew the many results they churn out. I shall thus stop grumbling and dish out two freshly baked slides:

So, what to make of these? I must say I find it highly peculiar that peak deaths due to COVID aligns precisely with 2020/w17 for 9 out of the 10 regions. London managed to peak a week earlier and that’s as much discrepancy as you are going to squeeze out of this. Assuming these counts are not skewed by administrative issues then we appear to have elderly folk in care across the entire length and breadth of two nations dying from a novel virus in a highly synchronised manner. I’m no epidemiologist but this seems très wacko.

Moving on to the non-COVID deaths we find 7 of the 10 regions peaking in a somewhat, and – dare we say it? – totally aseasonal manner during 2020/w16, with Wales, the South East and Yorkshire & Humberside waiting one more week until 2020/w17. Even if these were all erroneously labelled deaths arising from false negative test results and idiotic certification we’d still face the supreme issue of nationally coordinated deaths within our care homes. I’m no epidemiologist but this seems estramamente wacko.

Time to get the espresso on and break out the biscotti: we need a sugar-laden caffeine hit to understand what nobody seems bothered about.