Excess Deaths by Cause, England 2020/w1 – 2022/w46 (part 5)

Statistical analysis of a dataset obtained under FOI by Joel Smalley. In this article I present excess deaths for ICD-10 chapter VI (G00 – G99): Diseases of the nervous system

Please see part 1 of this series for background detail.

We now come to the fifth most frequent cause of death. This ICD-10 chapter covers everything from G00.0 Haemophilus meningitis to G99.8 Other specified disorders of nervous system in diseases elsewhere classified. In plain English we’re talking about conditions like meningitis, Parkinsonism, Alzheimer’s, Multiple Sclerosis, epilepsy, migraine, palsy and all manner of neuropathy. Sleep disorders feature in this chapter rather than chapter V (Mental and behavioural disorders), which is an interesting way of going about things.

Together with parts 1 to 4 of this miniseries we’ve now covered trends in excess death for the vast majority of causes (79%) and so this article will be the last in-depth dig into the data - numbers are going to get pretty thin on the ground from here on to be of value.

More Deaths To Come

As before, when viewing these slides please do bear in mind that delays in processing (largely due to involvement of the coroner) mean counts as far back as January 2022 are likely to be under-reported, especially for the younger age groups. Because of the volume of slides I need to present and limits to email delivery I will once again keep commenting to a minimum.

Keep an eye out for the CHEC (Catastrophic Health Collapse) death spike of 2020/w15 (w/e 10 April) and a tailing-off of excess during 2022 for the younger age groups. Keep your eyes peeled also for any persistent trends or offsets, whether this is characterised by a persistent positive or negative excess. Please do remember that vaccine harm will be one of many factors. Oh, and do re-visit part 1 again to see what I don’t like this method of estimating excess death. Professor Heneghan and team cover this nicely in their recent article.

Here we go…

Diseases of the Nervous System By Age Band

Yes folks, this is indeed a random walk (Wald-Wolfowitz runs test, p=0.166) – well spotted!

Apart from an impoverished 2022 (those processing delays strike again) this is also a random walk (Wald-Wolfowitz runs test, p=0.946).

We’re moving back into oulier spike territory so I’ve added a grey dashed line that represents the upper three sigma boundary to the series mean of +0.03 excess deaths per week. I think it fair to say something odd happened during week 2021/w25 (w/e 25 June) and 2022/w6 (w/e 11 Feb).

This just about hangs in there as a random walk if we exclude 2022 (Wald-Wolfowitz runs test, p=0.084) but note the appearance of a 2020/w13 (w/e 27 March) death spike just two weeks before the 2020/w15 CHEC death spike. There’s nothing like mud to muddy the water!

And just to prove how muddy this water is, here we have lack of any spring 2020 CHEC death spike for the 50 – 59y age group! Although this looks like a random walk, it is not as truly random as it looks (Wald-Wolfowitz runs test, p=0.028).

If you want to enter a room and make a statement and your name is CHEC death, this is the way to do it. We now have synchronicity across five major ICD-10 chapters covering neoplasms, circulatory disease, respiratory disease, mental and behaviour disorders, and diseases of the nervous system.

In fact, all the things that 79% of the goodly folk of England die of day-in day-out all just happened to happen in one big non-COVID wallop back in April 2020. Did somebody detonate a neutron bomb? I am at a loss for explanation for this is surely bigger than care home protocols killing granny and/or the run-down of emergency services and/or closure of elective beds. Perhaps everybody over 60y lost hope.

Note the steady build of excess deaths from the 2020/21 winter season onward – this is the sort of signal I’d be looking for in terms of vaccine harm but, of course, this is real life and not a clinical trial so all manner of confounding factor will be complicating matters. Nobody says this better than the stellar Professors Fenton and Neil.

Well now, there’s our spring 2020 CHEC death peak in full flow, coupled with the sort of signal we’d be looking for should we be trying to quantify vaccine harm mixed in with a truck load of confounding factors.

Ditto for the 80 – 89y and +90y groups. Fascinating and confusing in equal measure!

The overall picture, being dominated by the older age groups as usual. Instead of Matt Hancock eating unspeakable animal body parts down under I’d rather see him squirm explaining similar spikes for four other major ICD-10 chapters that represent the vast majority of deaths in England.

That last slide brings this series to a close and I haven’t been this depressed in ages. I’ve been analysing death data for nigh on 40 years now and I that spring 2020 death spike takes the biscuit as being the most gruesome fact I’ve seen. I feel an apple crumble coming on, maybe with some comforting custard and a snooze under a woollen blanket.

Kettle On!