What's With April 2020?

Exploring age & sex standardised non-COVID mortality a wee bit more...

In my newsletter of 10th June we saw something go bump in the night, being an inexplicable spike in non-COVID mortality in Mar and Apr 2020 across England & Wales. In my newsletter of 11th June we asked who killed granny after discovering an inexplicable rise in non-COVID mortality for females aged 80 years and over during Apr 2020.

This morning the farmyard cockerel decided to wake us all up at 4:23am and, as I waited for the kettle to boil, I tugged on my beard and wondered what the time series for the month of April looked like all the way back to 1970 - was April 2020 unique in some way or just another April doing its thing.

Here’s the answer in the first slide of the day…

What I am showing here is the non-COVID annual mortality rate for England & Wales for the period 1970 - 2021 alongside the annualised mortality rate for every April since 1970. We observe an April spike for 2020 that has not seen its like since 1977! A search among all other months of the pandemic year revealed t…