Excess Death & Heat Waves (Part 4)

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

In part 3 of this series I turned my attention to excess all cause death for those aged 65 and over, this focus aligning with the analysis made by the ONS/UKHSA for vulnerable residents. The big surprise here was that this subgroup didn’t turn out to be as vulnerable as we may have expected, with my statistical model providing an estimate of +182 deaths per heat wave week over the period 2015 - 2022 (p=0.038).

Since there were 8 such weeks during the summer of 2022 I arrived at a grand estimate of +1,456 excess deaths in those aged 65 and over that may ascribed to the exceedingly hot weather, which is less than half of the 3,271 deaths estimated by the ONS/UKHSA. Now that is some sizeable discrepancy and we may well wonder how on Earth they arrived at their headline conclusion.

Those who have followed my work since I first turned the handle back in March 2020 will no doubt note that this isn’t the first time that official reports haven’t held up to scrutiny. I’m not going to bother pursuing the detail of this and, instead, shall pursue estimates of excess death during heat waves - a topic that climate alarmists will be force feeding the nation at every opportunity whilst ignoring the greater number of deaths during cold spells.

With refinement of my study in mind I shall turn the handle on an idea that woke me at 3:44am, this being the notion of short and long heat waves.

Long & Short Heat Waves

Back on 18th July 2022 I sat at my workstation watching my North wall thermometer max out at 31.6°C at 17:00UTC, this falling well short of the Met Office predicted 36°C. I had placed a bet with friends that the pending 40°C UK record would be broken at Heathrow Airport unless bods at Cambridge opened the plant growing facility doors, a farce that I summarised in this article.

Heathrow won hands down, with other airports and major cities also hitting the magic 40°C. We sweltered for two days and that was it. Another mini-heat wave swept over the land during 11th - 14th August and it was all over; August cooled and I reached for my cardigan. Here’s what the Central England Temperature Record looks like for daily maxima during 2022:

So I got to thinking that intense but short bursts of heat might have a different impact on excess death than less intense but longer bursts, and decided to put the ‘burst length’ hypothesis to the test.