Excess Death & Heat Waves (Part 5)

A fruity response to the BBC headline that record UK excess deaths are due to the summer heat wave

In part 4 of this series I considered hypothesis that long and short heat wave periods might have a different impact on excess death but modest sample sizes snuck up and let the air out of my tyres. When I say ‘modest’ I mean that only 10 heat wave weeks during the summers of 1987 – 2019 managed to achieve my definition of five or more heat wave periods, a heat wave period being defined by ONS/UKHSA as a day upon which the Central England Temperature Record (HADCET) mean exceeded 20°.

After a coffee and doughnut I decided to abandon the rather artificial ONS/UKHSA concept of the heat wave period and reach for the HADCET mean maximum temperature attained each week, this measure telling us something about the degree of heat. A rather busy scatterplot was crayoned and we discovered something rather interesting indeed – very cool summers are also associated with elevated levels of excess death. I got out the butter pats and produced a simple but highly informative slide that revealed the relationship between maximum temperatures attained and excess death for summers during the COVID-neutral period 1987 – 2019.

Today I am going to repeat this analysis for summers during the not-so-neutral period of 1990 – 2022 and I am going to crayon vaccination rollout weeks in Pfizer blue, this being similar to the slide I tweeted in haste back on October 7th in response to the shameful BBC article that attempted to pass this summer’s extraordinary excess death toll off as due to climate change.