The Office for National Statistics (ONS) have released provisional counts of the number of deaths registered in England and Wales in the week ending 30 July 2021.
Prof Kevin McConway, Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics, The Open University, said:
“The number of registered deaths from all causes in England and Wales continues to be somewhat concerning, in my view. For the fourth week running, the number for the most recent week (24-30 July) is above the average for 2015-19, and for that week, there were more than 1,000 deaths above than that 5-year average, so 12% above average. In total there were almost 400 more deaths registered in the latest week than in the previous week, at a time of year when the average weekly number of deaths doesn’t change much from week to week. If you take the registered deaths involving Covid-19 from those excess deaths, there are still 679 non-Covid excess death registrations. It has been pointed out that some at least of these excess deaths were very probably caused by the spell of hot weather in mid-July. I’m sure that is correct, though without information on what actually caused those deaths, we can’t be sure how exactly how a big a role the heat wave played, compared to other possible reasons for excess deaths. In this country, hazards to health from the weather have been greater in cold spells rather than hot spells – but in the light of yesterday’s IPCC report which suggested that hot spells might become more common, I fear that we might have to find ways of dealing better with the risks to life from very hot weather.
“It’s not surprising that the number of deaths registrations involving Covid-19 in England and Wales for the latest week (24-30 July) is higher than for the previous week. The number of people infected with the virus was rising up to about the middle of July, on evidence both from the daily counts of confirmed new case and from the ONS Covid-19 Infection Survey (CIS), but after that infections began to fall. (The fall did not show up in the CIS prevalence estimates until the last week in July, but that lag is because these estimates include people who have been infected for some days or even a couple of weeks in some cases, not just newly infected people.) So I’d expect a fall in registered deaths involving Covid-19, but not for around three weeks after the numbers of infections started to fall. That is because, if someone’s Covid-19 becomes so serious that, sadly, they die, that takes some time after they were first infected. Also, it can take some time after someone dies for their death to be registered. So these new death registration figures aren’t long enough after infections started falling to show a decrease yet. The people whose deaths were registered in the latest week would generally have been infected when infections were still rising. Deaths as recorded daily on the dashboard at coronavirus.data.gov.uk did start showing some signs of a flattening off of the increase, or even a fall, about the end of July. So maybe we’ll see a fall in death registrations involving Covid-19 in next week’s ONS figures on death registration, which will cover the first week in August. What will happen after that is difficult to predict, given that the falls in counts of new cases on the dashboard in England are now plateauing.
“There are some good signs in the death registrations involving Covid-19. In Scotland and in Wales, they fell for the latest week compared to the previous week, though the numbers of deaths involving Covid-19 in Scotland and particularly in Wales are so low these days that it’s difficult to be sure of the trend.”
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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.”