Weekly Deaths Update (part 4)

Registered weekly deaths in England & Wales 2010 - 2022

Like Ada Doom we’ve seen something nasty in the woodshed: a dirty great hike in non-COVID all cause deaths during weeks 14 - 18 of 2020 that we suspect was generated in a most foul manner. Remove this hike and the pandemic evaporates into not much more than seasonal respiratory illness.

Today we are going to look for clues by considering age. The good news is that I have all cause weekly deaths by age band dating back to 2010; the bad news is that historic banding is somewhat limited in scope to just 7 seven wide bands (<1y, 1 - 14y, 15 - 44y, 45 - 64y, 65 - 74y, 75 - 84y, +85y) right up to 2020 when the ONS decided to release more refined datasets. Seven crude bands it shall be then, and we shall iron out the wrinkled cloth of population growth over 13 years by standardising counts to a total population of 58 million souls, though this makes little difference as we saw in part 1. Herewith seven slides with a story to tell in a visual stream inspired by Molly Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses. I could say we going from Doom to Bloom…

We observe that the pandemic only becomes strikingly evident in the 45 - 64y band and beyond. There are two discernible but modest spikes in the 15 - 44y band but nothing that seriously stands out; indeed so for peak mortality for this age group was back in 2010/w51. Ideally we’d split this whopper of a band down into something sensible and I shall be doing that for 2020 onward in a future newsletter.

Another feature that caught my eye is the apparent recent upturn in 1 - 14y deaths. I say apparent because it is quite clear that this series of deaths exhibits a negative slope, curiously reaching a low point when a pandemic was raging and healthcare services shutdown. There’s more juice I can squeeze out of this and shall be doing so over the next few episodes.

Kettle on!