Weekly Deaths Update (part 1)

Registered weekly deaths in England & Wales 2010 - 2022

A critical matter we need to squarely note with the analyses that follow is that date of death registration is not date of death. The registration process relies on availability of admin staff and that means delays, particularly at weekends and bank holidays, but also when illness strikes and the national death toll mounts. Those suits responsible for processing death data speak of delays of two weeks and more, running into months. We thus never glimpse the true picture unless we look back at least a year - please so bear this in mind when eyeballing data for 2022 and the latter half of 2021.

Another critical matter is standardisation against a known population. Anybody who has spent anytime pulling down mid-year population estimates from ONS will realise just how flimsy these are. Yes, we have the occasional household census but there are issues with this. Yes, we have various registers but there are issues with these. Yes, we have expert modelling but there are issues with this. The …