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The Office for National Statistics (ONS) have released provisional counts of the number of deaths registered in England and Wales in the week ending 12 March 2021.
Prof Kevin McConway, Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics, The Open University, said:
“One this sad anniversary of the first lockdown, it’s excellent to see the good news from this latest ONS bulletin on death registrations. Last week I commented that I expected death registrations in England and Wales to fall below the five-year average in the next week or two, and in fact it took only one week. The latest ONS data are for the week ending 12 March, and the number of registered deaths from all causes fell by 5% compared to the week before. That brought it down to 4% below the average number for the corresponding week in 2015-2019. Total deaths haven’t fallen below the five-year average since last September. What’s more, total registered deaths are below the five-year average number for the latest week in England and in Wales taken separately, and in all but one of the English regions. (The exception is the East Midlands, but even in that regions there were only 12 more deaths than the five-year average.) Deaths from all causes fell between the week ending 12 March and the week before in Wales and in all but one of the English regions. (Here the exception was the North East, where the number went up by 12, but there are always fluctuations, particularly in that region which has the smallest population in the country.) Things aren’t improving at the same rate absolutely everywhere, but they are improving almost everywhere.
“This fall in the total number of deaths is almost entirely because deaths involving Covid-19 have fallen very considerably. (Deaths for which Covid-19 was not mentioned on the death certificate fell by just 1 in the latest week compared to the previous week.) Registered deaths in England and Wales for which Covid-19 is mentioned on the death certificate fell by 604, that’s 29%, compared to the week before. The week before, deaths involving Covid-19 were 28% down on the previous week, and the percentage weekly falls for the two weeks before that were 29% and 28%. So there’s a really consistent pattern over several weeks now. Some of this will be from the continuing effects of lockdowns – the data so far go up only to the first week when schools reopened in England, and though that probably had an effect on slowing up the fall in infections, it’s too early to see any sign of that in death registrations.
“But a considerable proportion of the fall in deaths involving Covid-19 must be because of vaccinations. Registered deaths involving Covid-19 fell by 36% in people aged 60-69 in the week ending 12 March compared to the week before, which is well above the average fall of 29%. This is the age group where I’d expect vaccination to have made the biggest different in that particular week. Effects of vaccination showed up in earlier weeks in people in their 70s and older. Not enough people younger than 60 would yet have been vaccinated in time for a clear effect on deaths to have shown up in the data (since the immunity from vaccine takes a couple of weeks to build up, and it takes time after someone is infected for death to occur if, sadly, that happens). So the weekly decreases in Covid-related deaths in people aged 70+ or aged below 60 are close to the average for all ages, at 28% or 29%. However, the good effect of vaccination on those aged 70+ is clear if Covid-related deaths in the latest week are compared with the peak week in the latest wave, the week ending 29 January. Compared to that week, deaths of people aged 70-79 were 82% down in the latest week, and for people aged 80+ the reduction was a huge 85%. For people below 69 the decrease from the peak is about 74%, and it isn’t any bigger for the 60-69 group than for those younger – but that’s because the effect of vaccination on deaths of people in their 60s has really only started to show up in the most recent week.
“There is still some way to go, though. In the most recent week (ending 12 March), there were still 1,501 registered deaths involving Covid-19. That’s around the weekly level in late October last year. For 80% of those deaths, Covid-19 was the underlying cause. The pressures on hospitals have eased hugely in the past couple of weeks. But this horrible disease is still killing many more people each week than it was last summer. Covid-19 was involved in one in seven of all deaths in the most recent week, and almost one in five of those Covid deaths was of someone aged under 65. In the peak week for Covid-19 deaths in the current wave, about one in nine of Covid deaths were in people under 65. This again shows the benefits of vaccination – but it also shows we’ve got to continue with vaccination for younger people, and that vaccination alone isn’t going to defeat Covid quickly.
“The fact that deaths from all causes has now fallen below the five-year average isn’t a sign that the second wave is over. It’s certainly a sign that the wave is gradually on its way out – but one reason that total deaths are below average is that deaths not involving Covid-19 are well below average. They have not fallen in the latest week, but they have been running well below average throughout the second wave, 17% below average in the most recent week. Some of that will be because people, who would otherwise have died that week, in fact died of Covid-19 at some previous time. But some of it will be because of the effects of the lockdown. Reduced social contact reduces the risk of other infectious diseases as well as Covid-19, particularly respiratory diseases including influenza, so deaths from those causes are down on the long-term average. Also it’s possible that deaths from transport accidents many have reduced, since people aren’t travelling so much. If these non-Covid deaths were back up nearer their usual level, then things wouldn’t be looking so good for excess deaths. As lockdowns ease, these deaths not involving Covid-19 are likely to increase.”
Nigel Marriott FRSS, Independent Statistician, said:
“The week ending 12 March 2021 is the first time excess deaths in England and Wales have been lower than the 10 year median since last summer. I would regard this as the end of the second wave, as demonstrated by the below chart and graph.
“The 2nd wave was longer than the 1st wave (22 weeks vs 12 weeks) but total excess deaths were lower at 54k vs 59k. The pattern of the 2nd wave shows that in most weeks, excess deaths exceeded the maximum seen over the last 10 years but not to a large extent with the exception of Christmas/New Year when excess deaths were much higher than normal. The other difference between the two waves is that in wave 2 total deaths due to or with COVID19 at 71k were higher than excess deaths which means that excess deaths not involving COVID19 were 18k lower than normal. This differs from wave 1 where excess deaths not involving COVID19 11k higher than normal.”
Prof Neil Ferguson, Director of the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, Imperial College London, said:
“The new ONS data on deaths is encouraging in suggesting the second devastating wave of the pandemic is behind us. But calling epidemics ‘waves’ can be misleading, in implying a phenomenon which has reached a natural end. That is not the case here. The rapid decline in deaths we’ve thankfully seen is entirely because of the lockdown and the rapid roll-out of vaccines. So while I’m optimistic that this we will be able to return to something more like normal in the next few months, we need to remain vigilant and cautious in the pace with which social distancing is relaxed – particularly given the threat still posed by new variants of the virus.”
Prof Paul Hunter, Professor in Medicine, The Norwich School of Medicine, University of East Anglia, said:
“Although there were still 1501 deaths from COVID in the week up to 12th March this is the first week since August last year (excluding summer bank holiday weekend due to reporting delays) that reported deaths from all causes in the week were below the average from the years 2015 to 2019. So this latest week was the first time in over 6 months that there were no excess deaths (more deaths than on average in a non-pandemic year).”
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.”
None others received.