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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 20 August 2021.
Prof Kevin McConway, Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics, The Open University, said:
“The latest provisional death registration figures from ONS go up to the week 14-20 August, and the news is somewhat encouraging. On deaths where Covid-19 is mentioned on the death certificate, the overall short-term trend is static, across the UK as a whole and, broadly speaking, in each of the four UK countries. The UK total for the most recent week is practically unchanged from the week before, at 654 compared to 652 for the previous week. In England, the number increased by just 1 (from 550 the previous week to 551). In Wales the number fell by 1 from 19 to 18, in Scotland it was unchanged at 41 both weeks, and in Northern Ireland there was an increase from 40 to 43.
“Roughly these short-term trends do match what has been seen in the daily counts of deaths within 28 days of a positive Covid-19 test, as reported on the dashboard at coronavirus.data.gov.uk, at least if I compare them with the dashboard deaths classified by the date when the deceased person actually died rather than when their death was reported. The UK dashboard totals have been increasing very slowly since the start of August, following a faster rise before that. The dashboard UK total for 14-20 August, the latest week in the ONS registration data, is 668, close to the total UK registrations mentioning Covid-19 that week (654). Generally throughout the pandemic, the numbers of deaths within 28 days of a positive test have been lower than the number of death registrations that mention Covid-19, but that has not been the case for the past few weeks. I hope that recent pattern will continue, so that weekly Covid-19 death registration do not rise much above the figure of roughly 100 a day figure that we’re currently seeing in the dashboard, but that remains to be seen. A continuing figure of 100 deaths a day, or 36,500 a year, would put Covid-19 into the table of the leading causes of death in the UK – considerably fewer than from Alzheimer and other dementias, or from heart disease, but similar to strokes, or influenza and pneumonia, or lung cancer. So we do need to see a fall in death numbers, but at least they are currently not rising.
“The overall level pattern of death registrations involving Covid-19 in England does hide some regional differences. Deaths involving Covid-19 have been rising over the most recent few weeks in Yorkshire and the Humber, the Midlands and London, but falling in the North East. The short-term trends in other regions are not so clear. However, regional trends are harder to discern – one would expect more variability than for the country as a whole, just because the number of deaths in a region is smaller.
“Registered deaths in England and Wales from all causes were lower in the most recent week than the week before, by 359 (a fall of 3%). That comes after a pattern of weekly increases in all-cause death registrations that has been going on since the end of June (apart from one single week when there was a very small fall). At this time of year, the five-year average number of deaths from all causes from 2015 to 2019 was roughly flat, so this isn’t some sort of usual seasonal pattern. It also isn’t all due to deaths involving Covid-19, because there have simply not been enough of them to account for all the excess deaths, by a considerable margin. Some of these excess deaths would have been due to the very hot weather in mid-July, but that doesn’t account for all of them by any means, and we’ll have to wait for more detailed data on the causes of those deaths to get a better picture of the reasons. The fall in the latest week’s number is welcome, but deaths are still 10% above the five-year average, and only about half of those excess deaths in the most recent week can be accounted for by Covid-19.”
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.”