Excess Death & Heat Waves (Part 6)
A fruity response to the BBC headline that record UK excess deaths are due to the summer heat wave
In part 5 of this series we discovered that weekly standardised excess non-COVID deaths across England in the post-vaccine era stand out like a sore thumb even after accounting for mean maximum temperature. The BBC may well try and blame a whole bunch of folk inexplicably dying on the record-breaking 40°C heat wave but rigorous analysis of the data indicates otherwise.
After risk stratifying data and looking at rates for summer excess deaths over the COVID-neutral period 1987 – 2019 I arrived at a most telling slide that revealed absolutely no positive trend in heat-related deaths in England over the last 36 years. There is thus a disconnect in alarmist thinking the size of Texas. What needs ‘saving’ here, if anything, is the art of rational thought.
Weather vs. Vaccine
The analytical work I’ve undertaken so far now puts us in a position to estimate the number of excess summer deaths that are likely due to searing temperatures on a week-by-week basis over the period 1987 – 2022. In this regard the penultimate slide in part 5 provides an annual summary of heat-induced excess summer death, and all that it remains for me to do is subtract those counts from total excess summer death.
I’ve used the phrase ‘weather-related death’ rather than heat-related death in the following slides because of the remarkable discovery that unusually cool summers also kill more folk; a fact that is sure to stick in the craw of alarmists. I’ve presented all cause as well as non-COVID excess summer deaths because of the tangled web that is death certification.
N.B. When the ONS declare a certified COVID death they mean a death certificate upon which COVID is mentioned; that is to say COVID may be entered in section II of the form that lists comorbidities rather than causes. Counts of certified COVID death should thus not be taken as counts of causal death, though the ONS claim a very high degree of overlap. The nature of certification and the manner in which certificates are processed are such that we cannot rely on ‘causal’ to mean causal and, in any case, deaths are rarely uni-causal. This is a whole can of worms that I once opened back on my facebook channel back in 2020 and I shall endeavour to visit the subject afresh here on Substack.
For the time being all we need to bear in mind is that declared ‘COVID deaths’ are not necessarily COVID deaths proper, which means non-COVID deaths are not necessarily non-COVID deaths proper, which is why wise analysts stick to studying all cause death! The truth of the matter will lie somewhere between the two slides presented below: