Missing Deaths Exploration (part 1)
Weekly all cause death figures published by the Office for National Statistics do not stand up to scrutiny. The evidence indicates we are missing a bunch of young deaths.
Background
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) prefer to publish mortality data by date of registration (DOR) rather than date of death (DOD), this being a constant irritation to analysts chasing the harms and benefits of all that has transpired over the last 33 months. Whilst I touch upon the matter in several articles, this article series here succinctly captures the essence, revealing the ONS’ wooly reasoning as to why they do this crazy thing.
Since it is a legal requirement in the UK to register all deaths within five days then we may assume DOR and DOD counts are not going to get totally out of kilter over time and this was borne out by my analysis. The biggest headache that DOR data causes are spikes and dips in the record that are substantial during holiday periods when registry offices within each diocease are closed.
The Biggest Headache Of All
Spikes and dips within the DOR data record that arise from administrative matters are easy to iron out using various smoothing te…