ONS Baseline Derivation For Excess Death: ignorance or corruption?

More jiggery-pokery from an organisation that ought to know better

I have been busy preparing datafiles for another stab at quantifying vaccine harm using ARIMA time series techniques, an effort that fizzled out like a damp squib in part 9 of my Vaccine & Death series (but which promises to build back better).

All depends on how we derive excess death, and the technique adopted by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) is to subtract prior 5-year means from observed counts of all cause death on a week-by-week basis. I’ve grumbled on about this approach before, pointing out that disease doesn’t come and go like clockwork, thus an early or late flu season will throw a spanner in the works when we try to compare this with a historically-derived baseline whose bugs had a different idea.

Grumbling aside this is an easy calculation to make and the concept is intuitively accessible for most people; that is, we all readily understand that by subtracting the historic seasonal pattern for death - the ‘baseline’ - we will end up with a surplus or deficit that …