Excess non-COVID Mortality in England & Wales 1975 - 2021

What killed granny back in Apr 2020? (rev 1.1)

In my newsletter of 10th June we saw something go bump in the night, being an inexplicable and sudden rise in age & gender adjusted non-COVID mortality for England & Wales during Apr 2020 that came to light when we ran some ARIMA modelling over the data series. Here is that result again…

There are a number of ways we could about about figuring what caused this but I opted for looking at excess non-COVID mortality for all 18 age groups by gender. That makes 36 slides to ogle in succession, each being a splatter of 564 tiny little red dots, which is a lot of ogling. All this is subjective but we somehow have to objectively decide if an outlying point is indeed an outlying point, which entails significance testing to determine whether such a stray point could have arisen by chance.

All this seems like hard work so I took the lazy route of letting the implementation of ARIMA within my stats package do all the work for me by automatically identifying the optimum model structure for each of t…