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The Office for National Statistics (ONS) have released the latest data for deaths in England Wales, including deaths from COVID-19.
Prof Kevin McConway, Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics, The Open University, said:
“The weekly ONS data release giving provisional numbers of death registrations in England and Wales takes us back to the gloomy position on the pandemic that we were in before the turnround in figures for new cases that has emerged in the past week or so. That’s because the ONS bulletin takes the death registration data up to the week 10-16 July. People who, sadly, died from Covid-19 in that week would have been infected maybe two weeks before, in the week 26 June-2 July, or maybe before that, and at that time the numbers of new infections in England and Wales were growing quite rapidly, according to the new case counts on the dashboard at coronavirus.data.gov.uk and also to the results of the ONS Covid-19 Infection Survey. So it’s not surprising that this new ONS bulletin shows the number of Covid-19 deaths increasing compared to the previous week, continuing the pattern of week-on-week increases that had been going on since the start of June. There were 218 registered deaths involving Covid-19 in England and Wales in that most recent week, up by about a fifth compared to the previous week. Of course, that’s a very small number compared to the weekly counts we saw earlier in the year, reflecting the success of vaccination.
“Despite the fact that these death registration figures don’t appear to tell us much that wasn’t already known, they certainly do have informative value, because they aren’t affected by some issues that might bias the data on deaths on the dashboard, such as people who might die of something entirely unrelated to Covid-19 within 28 days after testing positive. (In fact that’s not really a major problem with the dashboard deaths figures, but people do worry about it sometimes.) But these death registration figures can’t throw any light at all on whether or why numbers of new infections have started decreasing in the past week or so, or on whether that decrease might continue – those changes are much too recent to have shown up in death registrations yet. That applies even to Scotland, where case numbers started falling around the start of June, much earlier than in England and Wales. The new ONS bulletin is mostly about England and Wales, but does also give counts of Covid-related death registrations in Scotland (and Northern Ireland). The numbers of registered Covid-related deaths in Scotland for the most recent week in the bulletin, ending 16 July, were about 50% higher than the previous week’s figure, but again, people who died in the week would have been infected around the end of June, when cases in Scotland were at their peak. Things might (or might not) look different for Scotland in next week’s ONS bulletin.
“Back in England and Wales, the number of registered deaths from all causes in the most recent week was about the same as the previous week, and higher than the five-year average number for the corresponding weeks in 2015-19. Total registered deaths were above that long-term average in the previous week too, ending a pattern of total deaths being below the five-year average that goes right back to early March. (There are a few weeks where the registration numbers did briefly go above the five-year average, but they were all close to Bank Holidays and are probably due to delayed registration of deaths. In data classified by the date the person died, rather than when the death was registered, the pattern is consistent.) I can’t say why this is happening, because we don’t have data on the cause of death (apart from Covid-19). But it’s not directly due to Covid-19, since the number of excess deaths above the five-year average is about double the number of deaths involving Covid-19. It could just be a statistical blip of some sort, perhaps to do with when deaths are registered. Or maybe it’s another, less pleasant, sign of things returning to normal – reductions in all-cause deaths, that have arisen because lockdowns reduce many other infections than just Covid-19, might be easing off. We’ll eventually find out, when more data on cause of death become available.”
All our previous output on this subject can be seen at this weblink:
www.sciencemediacentre.org/tag/covid-19
Declared interests
Prof Kevin McConway: “I am a Trustee of the SMC and a member of its Advisory Committee. I am also a member of the Public Data Advisory Group, which provides expert advice to the Cabinet Office on aspects of public understanding of data during the pandemic. My quote above is in my capacity as an independent professional statistician.”