Non-COVID Care Home Deaths (Data)

Source files for analysis of weekly non-COVID care home deaths in England & Wales 2020-2022 (rev 1.3)

Everything you need to understand how yesterday’s shocking graphs have come about, including ONS source data is contained in ZIP file on a shared Google Drive folder that may be found here. If you want to download the source data from ONS yourself you can find the landing page with filters here.

I have tidied up my spreadsheets so they hopefully make sense to others and have placed all ONS source files in subfolders stamped with the date of download. The strings in brackets after each source filename are my annotations to help me identify the frequency and range of the data contained therein.

ONS source file data (19 files in total) were brought together in one master spreadsheet called Weekly Care Home Deaths (sources).xlsx to ensure a commonly coordinated format (some data had to be transposed). All in all you’ll see tabs for 20 different ONS sources. Cell A1 in each tab contains a hyperlink to the ONS source file and table within that file so you can trace entries right back to the origin with ease.

All this information is brought together in a spreadsheet called Weekly Care Home Deaths 2020.01 – 2022.21.xlsx where you also get to see the coding convention for variable names, estimation methods, corrections and calculations made. I’ve also reproduced the two graphs for you.

Somebody asked in the comments how many non-COVID excess deaths there were in the period 2020/w13 – 2020/w21. You can go find the total yourself in the spreadsheet though I’ll spoil the movie and report the incredible sum of 11,253. If we take the 9-week period 2020/w1 – 2020/w9 we arrive at a total of 4,060 excess non-COVID deaths, so the rate rocketed by a factor of 2.77 (277% in old money).

We may expect care homes to have been under tremendous pressure at this time, with neglect and errors creeping in, but this would have generated a steady ramping of excess death as residents slowly suffered; it would not have generated a sudden and significant spike. Some folk are arguing that misdiagnosed COVID death during the early stages of the pandemic may be to blame and I am sure this forms part of the picture, but again this would not explain a sudden and significant surge in (synchronised) death. In my NHS experience blips like this are caused by changes in policy and we must consider the unpalatable prospect of iatrogenic death.

In the final analysis none of us should be guessing as to what may or may not have caused this extraordinary care home spike. There should be thorough and independent investigation, and there should ideally be a public inquiry. In my former surgical unit every single death was discussed by a multi-disciplinary team in detail every month; we were not satisfied until we agreed all that could have been done was done. Surely our elderly in care deserve no less.