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 people dying unnecessarily. If we consider this measure alone we can state that things have been steadily getting better up to around 2012 when stagnation set in. Either we’re now saving as many people as can be saved or austerity measures are taking their toll.

At this point in our cogitation it’s best not to fall into the trap of thinking only about hospitals, wonder drugs, medical training and space-age surgery. We’ve also got to think about seat belts, crash helmets, nutrition, sewage, policing, transport, pollution, manufacturing, regulatory bodies and standards (and then some). What I’m pretty certain of is warnings on the back of packets of peanuts that the packet may contain peanuts hasn’t really contributed much. I’m also a bit suspicious of the use by date of 2023 for my packet of 250 million-year-old Himalayan rock salt. Idiocy aside, something as simple as regulation of the food supply needs to be considered as a serious contender along with statins and open-heart surgery, and anything else you can think of! Right now I’m thinking of knife laws and the clampdown on drink-driving.

Whilst we are all thinking about the really big picture we may note that the pandemic of 2020 certainly stands out but it is by no means unique in terms of excessive all cause death over these last 53 years. Rank-wise 1970/w2 takes the gold with 41.817 deaths per 100k population, silver is awarded to 2000/w1 with 39.522 deaths per 100k population and bronze goes to 1999/w1 with 38.812 deaths per 100k population. The pandemic year of 2020 finally crosses the line in 4th place at 37.464 deaths per 100k population for 2020/w16. At this point I have to ask if we are looking at an outbreak of a genuinely novel and extremely deadly virus or another variant of influenza coronavirus similar to those that have appeared from time to time over the last 53 years. Has the government made a mountain out of a mole hill?