Weekly Deaths Update (part 9)

Registered weekly deaths in England & Wales 1970 - 2022

With the birds singing and daffodils blooming I thought I’d celebrate 1st May 2022 with a big picture and plenty of perspective. I present weekly all cause mortality for England & Wales for the period 1970/w2 to 2022/w13 as a pip-laden scatterplot complete with Gaussian smoothing function (green line). There’s plenty to feast on here that may be crushed by an argument that runs along the lines of “we can’t sensibly compare medical care in 2022 with that given in 1972”. Whilst there’s an element of truth to this it really is only scratching the surface of a much bigger issue that must incorporate more social, economic, cultural, technological and cosmic factors than I’ve had hot dinners.

We can set aside the immense difficulties of making sense of historic data by ignoring why things have happened as they have happened and simply looking at what happened. People did die and they died at a different rate that suggests an overall improvement in whatever it is we need to improve to stop pe…