Catastrophic Health Collapse (part 1)

In this series I take a look at what ‘official’ excess death figures for England would look like if we surgically remove the hike that is the 2020 spring death spike

In a five part series that started on 6th February 2023 with an article entitled Excess Death Figures: Further Considerations (part 1) I took subscribers through an exploration of methods that may be used to derive excess death, highlighting some of the issues that arise when we try to assess whether deaths we observe each week are ‘normal’ for that time of year.

We discovered that we can get very different results depending on the exact method used such that nobody can claim they have produced the one and only authoritative set of indisputable figures. Arguably this was best illustrated by using ARIMA time series modelling to show that by moving the predictive period start date by just eight weeks we can swing from a net overall negative excess of -78,789 excess non-COVID deaths to +132,994 excess non-COVID deaths; a swing of some 211,783 deaths in England for the period 2020/w1 – 2022/w46. In terms of weekly means this equates to a swing of +1,402.6 excess non-COVID deaths… and just …