select search filters
briefings
roundups & rapid reactions
before the headlines
Fiona fox's blog
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) have released provisional counts of the number of deaths registered in England and Wales in the week ending 29 October 2021.
Prof Kevin McConway, Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics, The Open University, said:
“This week’s ONS release of provisional numbers of death registrations takes the data up to the week 23-29 October. As usual, it concentrates on England and Wales, but also includes some figures for the whole UK.
“On deaths where Covid-19 is mentioned on the death certificate, the position for the whole UK isn’t wonderful, and indeed the same applies for most of the separate parts of the UK. The number of Covid-related death registrations for the most recent week is 1,042, which is 7% up on the figure for the previous week. That makes it the third consecutive week when Covid-related death registrations have gone up across the UK. Indeed, the UK numbers have increased week on week ever since mid-June, more than four months now, with the exception of two weeks at the start of October where there were reasonably substantial week-on-week decreases. But for the latest week (ending 29 October), the UK total of Covid-related death registrations is pretty well back up to the late September peak level of a little over 1,000 weekly deaths. Before that, the last time the weekly number of Covid-related death registrations was at the level of the latest week was back in mid-March, when the number of people vaccinated was well under half what it is now.
“I don’t imagine that Covid-related death registrations in the UK will continue in the long term at this high level of over 1,000 a week, though I would certainly like to see them start to fall sooner rather than later. The current pattern in these ONS registration figures of a gradual rise from the Spring until late September, followed by a fall and a subsequent rise, does match the trends in the numbers of deaths within 28 days of a positive test on the dashboard at coronavirus.data.gov.uk, if we take into account that there is generally a short delay between the time someone, sadly, dies, and when their death is registered.
“The dashboard figures continue later (closer to today) than do the death registration figures, and have generally continued to rise slowly, though there is a hint of a fall in the latest few days. It’s too soon to say whether the numbers of deaths on the dashboard really are falling consistently. On the face of it, one might expect numbers of Covid-related deaths to fall, given that we’ve seen recent decreases in the numbers of infections (according to both the ONS Coronavirus Infection Survey (CIS) and the REACT-1 survey), and also in the numbers of new confirmed cases on the dashboard. Obviously there’s a time interval between someone being infected and dying from Covid-19, if, sadly, that happens, so that trends in numbers of deaths will lag behind trends in infections or cases by a couple of weeks.
“However, I have to say that it’s not a foregone conclusion that deaths will start falling from now, or, if they do, that they will fall as quickly as cases and infections. That’s because the recent falls in infections and cases have principally been in children and young people aged up to about 17 or 18, and people in those age groups are very unlikely indeed to become so ill with Covid-19 that they die. Indeed there was some evidence in last week’s CIS release of increases in infection rates in some of the older age groups, who can be much more affected by serious Covid illness, alongside the falls in infections in children. Reductions in infection rates in children and young people should eventually work through to reductions in infections, and hence in serious illness and death, in older people, because their chance of being infected by younger people in their families will reduce. So I’m optimistic that Covid-related deaths will fall at some point – the question is, when?
“Back to Covid-related death registrations in the UK in the week ending 29 October. As well as rising (compared to the previous week) for the UK as a whole, they rose in England, and (slightly) in Scotland, remained unchanged in Wales, and fell slightly in Northern Ireland. They also rose week-on-week in eight of the nine English regions, though they fell in Yorkshire and the Humber. You’d expect more variability from week to week, in either direction, in the smaller UK countries and the English regions than for the whole UK, because the numbers of deaths there are much smaller than for the whole UK and so the effect of random fluctuations is proportionally larger. But the increase in the largest country, England, of nearly 10% in a week is not encouraging.
“The position on death registrations from all causes, in England and Wales, is more encouraging. The numbers fell for the latest week, compared to the previous week, by almost 3%. However, the number of registrations is still above the five-year average for 2015-19, so that (on that measure) there are excess deaths. This is now the seventeenth consecutive week of excess death registrations in England and Wales and, on this measure at least, it does still seem that not all those excess deaths are directly due to 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.”