Weekly Deaths Update (part 7)
Registered weekly deaths in England & Wales 2020 - 2022
As promised, herewith time series for weekly COVID deaths across England & Wales for the period 2020/w1 to 2022/w13 for those under 50 years of age at death. Counts for the youngest groups were seriously spartan so I’ve had to lump them together into an under 20 years of age catch-all. You can see just how spartan from the table below
I’m hoping that folk by now will realise what we’re labelling a ‘COVID’ death isn’t necessarily a COVID death. That is to say a death whereby SARS-COV-2 infection has been verified by more than just a PCR test with other pathogens ruled out, this sole infection leading to onset of severe COVID-19 symptoms and respiratory failure with diffuse alveolar damage in a patient who wasn’t also suffering from other forms of major illness. There is such a thing as multicausal death yet when it comes to COVID only COVID counts. Until we get our hands on the medical notes for each and every patient and undertake a rigorous clinical audit we cannot be sure whether any death labelled as a ‘COVID death’ is correctly ascribed.
And now for the slides…
I find it curious that the under 20y COVID deaths should cluster more around the latter half of 2021 in a broad manner than they do during the first ‘novel’ wave or second ‘semi-novel’ and somewhat seasonal wave. What we are looking at here is not so much a viral outbreak amongst youngsters but a bad year. Are we looking at the adverse impact of vaccination?
This broad year of badness starts to reveal itself in the 25 - 29y age band onward. We observe a pandemic-like peak at the outset, a pandemic-like peak during the initial stages of the vaccination programme, then a lower-level grumble for most of 2021. It’s as though the natural peak of a virus doing its mutated thing and running amok amongst the population for a short while has been taken and smeared across many weeks. Whatever the many mechanisms at play here I would suggest we are looking at two profoundly different scenarios: analysis-wise I’m thinking of early vs late vaccination periods but let’s see what the older population bring to the table…