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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 13 August 2021.
Prof Kevin McConway, Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics, The Open University, said:
“This week’s ONS bulletin on provisional numbers of deaths registered in England and Wales take the data forward to the week 7-13 August. There are some glimmers of hope in the new figures, but I have to say that they aren’t burning very bright. On deaths where Covid-19 is mentioned on the death certificate, the number registered in England and Wales in the latest week is up on the week before, for the sixth week running. In the latest week, 571 such deaths were registered, which is about 8% higher than the week before. The glimmer of hope there is that the increase is smaller than in recent weeks – for instance, the figure from the week before (ending 6 August) was 30% up on the week before that, for example. And the number of registered deaths involving Covid-19 in the most recent week was down in Wales compared to the week before. The bulletin gives UK-wide figures too – 652 registrations involving Covid-19 in the most recent week, and the UK total has gone up every week for 9 weeks now. But again the rise is smaller than it has been in recent weeks, just 7% up on the week before, and there was a substantial fall in Covid-related deaths in Scotland (though a substantial rise in Northern Ireland).
“It’s informative to compare the ages of the people who had their death involving Covid registered in the most recent week, with the characteristics when numbers of Covid deaths were previously at the sort of level we’re seeing now. In the latest week, it’s still the case that most of those whose deaths were registered were in older age groups – but about 1 in 14 (7%) of those whose deaths were registered in England and Wales were aged under 50 years. The most recent time that there were over the current figure of 571 deaths in a week was in late March this year, and back then only about 1 in 28 (under 4%) were aged under 50. To find the time before that when registered deaths involving Covid-19 were at about the level of the most recent week, we have to go back to mid-October 2020, and back then only about 1 in 55 (under 2%) of Covid-related deaths were of people aged under 50. Last October we had no vaccines, and in late March most people in the older age groups had been vaccinated but not necessarily with both doses. This increasing proportion of younger people among the Covid deaths clearly has a lot to do with vaccination. But these figures do illustrate that this horrible disease can have a serious effect on all kinds of people.
“That showed up in a different way in yesterday’s ONS release of monthly mortality figures (https://www.ons.gov.uk/releases/monthlymortalityanalysisjuly2021). Among many other things, that release split up the numbers of people whose death was caused by Covid-19 (as the underlying cause of death) according to whether they had pre-existing medical conditions. Of people under 65 who died of Covid-19 in the three months March to June this year, almost a third had no pre-existing conditions. Last year, before vaccinations, a fairly common view was that the people who were, sadly, dying from Covid-19 were almost all old and had other medical conditions. That was never the whole picture, of course, but it wasn’t completely misleading. But things have changed now. In helping protect older people and people with certain health conditions, vaccination has showed up more clearly that we’re all at some risk.
“I’ve been suggesting for a couple of weeks in my comments on these weekly figures that the number of deaths involving Covid-19 might possibly fall in the next week or two. Well, that hasn’t happened yet. My basis for those thoughts was that the daily numbers of deaths within 28 days of a positive test, on the dashboard at coronavirus.data.gov.uk, looked as if they had stopped rising around the start of August and could have been falling slowly after that. If that pattern fed through into death registrations, it would be delayed, partly because the registration figures that are published every Tuesday relate to almost two weeks earlier, and partly because the time delay between when someone dies and their death is registered has to be taken into account too. So I thought that the number of registered deaths might start falling, slowly, perhaps in next week’s bulletin. But now I’m really not confident about that. The numbers of deaths within 28 days of a positive test on the dashboard now clearly looks as if it levels off, rather than falls slowly, after the start of August in the UK as a whole and in England and Wales. (It does show a very slowly decreasing trend in Scotland.) So perhaps the best we can expect in the short term is that deaths where Covid-19 is mentioned on the death certificate might also level off, or at least rise much more slowly. But we’ll see.
“Turning away from Covid-19, registered deaths from all causes are again above the average for the five years 2015-19, as they have been in England and Wales for six weeks now. They are also above the five-year average in total across the UK. These excess deaths can’t all be explained by deaths of people who had Covid-19. In the most recent week, for England and Wales, there were 1,270 more deaths than the five-year average – that’s 14% higher than that average. But the number of registered deaths involving Covid-19 was considerably less than that, at 571, so that leaves nearly 700 excess deaths unaccounted for. It’s not possible to say what is actually causing these excess deaths, other than Covid-19, because we don’t yet have data on the causes of death involved. In previous weeks, there was clearly a marked and prompt effect of the very hot weather in mid-July, but the weather hasn’t been particularly hot since then. We’ll find out eventually when ONS can publish some more detailed data, possibly in their next monthly analysis that’s due in about a month’s time and will cover August.”
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.