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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 6 August 2021.
Prof Paul Hunter, Professor in Medicine, The Norwich School of Medicine, University of East Anglia, said:
“The increase in COVID deaths in the week ending 6th August reported by ONS for England and Wales pretty much mirror the equivalent numbers reported each day on the DHSC daily dashboard and largely reflect the rapid rise in cases up until about a month ago. Data on the DHSC dashboard suggest reported deaths may be plateauing so we are unlikely to see such this increasing rapidly over the next couple of weeks at least after next week’s report (the week ending 13th Aug) . We may even see some falls in the number of deaths being reported.
“But within the ONS report the number of excess deaths in England and Wales are still up and have been elevated since the week ending 9th July. Less than half of these excess deaths can be explained by COVID deaths so it is unclear why all deaths are so elevated. One reason could be the heat wave in July so hopefully this will fall back next week, but we will need to see.”
Prof Kevin McConway, Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics, The Open University, said:
“Today’s provisional ONS release on death registrations in England and Wales takes the data up to the week ending 6 August. I should probably start by admitting that I was a bit over-optimistic last week in my comments on this ONS release, when I wrote that maybe we’d see a fall in death registrations involving Covid-19 in the latest figures in this week’s release. We didn’t – in fact they have gone up to 527 (in England and Wales), an increase of almost a third on the previous week’s figure of 404. (At least I said ‘maybe’…) I was basing my suggestion on the trends in the numbers of deaths recorded on the dashboard at coronavirus.data.gov.uk, which appeared to flatten off or perhaps even start decreasing, at some time around the start of August. However, later data on the dashboard make it clearer that the trend on the dashboard is a flattening off rather than a clear decrease, and that the highest recent weekly dashboard figure (using the same weeks, ending Friday, as in the ONS data) was for the week ending 6 August. So what can be seen in the latest ONS figures is, roughly, what can be seen on the dashboard, and it’s not surprising that the figure for registered deaths involving Covid-19 is up this week. It probably won’t fall next week either, because of the inevitable delays between when a person dies and when their death is registered (which average about a week). Maybe the week after that? I do at least expect the number not to rise so quickly, for a couple of weeks, as it has been recently – but, depending on what happens to numbers of new infections, it could well start rising again before long. We’ll see.
“The number of registrations of deaths from any cause for the most recent week is again higher than the average for 2015-19, by about 13%, so excess deaths are occurring, as has been the case for five weeks now. We can’t be certain about the reasons of these excess deaths without more information on exactly what the cause of death was for the people who, sadly, have died. The excess is quite a bit larger than can be accounted for by Covid-related deaths. But it has become even clearer, I’d say, that the spell of hot weather in the middle of July must have been responsible to a substantial degree. Looking at the total numbers of deaths according to the date the person died, rather than when the death was registered, it’s clear that that was a substantial peak in the week from 17 to 23 July, coinciding with the hot weather. Over 10,000 people died in England and Wales in that week, compared to under 9,000 per week before that right back to the start of May, and indeed also the week after the recent peak (the week ending 30 July). (The data classified by the date when the person died are not yet complete for the latest week ending 6 August because of registration delays.) This sharp peak in deaths in that particular week does not show up at all clearly in the data classified by when the death was registered – it seems to have been smoothed out over a longer period of time, again quite possibly because of patterns of how long it takes to register a death.”
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.