Profile of increasing death rates in the UK

The ONS data on weekly deaths is a mine of insightful information once you get through the formatting and present the data more clearly.

Despite there being different measures of the number of excess deaths, I've prepared a simple benchmark analysis comparing week 3-13 of 2020 with weeks 14 and 15 to see where the most obvious variances occur.

Weeks 3-13 were chosen because they are relatively stable figures (not impacted by the post-New Year spikes) before we start to see an upward swing in weeks 14 and 15. Arguably I could have excluded week 13 in the upswing as well, but the difference would have been minimal in the final picture formed. I have assumed at this point that the increase in deaths in this period are driven by Covid-19.

First we need to build a benchmark from weeks 3-13, the top chart shows the average distribution of weekly deaths by age band. Typically this is about 11,250 deaths per week with 79% of deaths occurring in the 70+ age band. Using these figures as a benchmark we can then look and see how many deaths we saw in weeks 14 and 15 and see where the differences occur as a proxy for Covid-19 deaths.

In terms of pure numbers, this shows thousands of more deaths occurred in the older age groups when compared to trend, with some age bands being up to 79% higher than the average of the previous periods. All age groups from 45-49 year olds upwards are over 50% higher, but because of the lower base for the younger groups they are not a major contributor to the overall increase in deaths in absolute terms. 

Performing the same analysis by gender gives the result shown below. In week 15, males deaths rates were 176% of the usual trend, and female deaths 153%, these figure may also increase further as more data is made available. This difference follows the same pattern that has been observed in various analyses before with males having a higher risk of death from Covid-19 than females.

And finally a similar comparison looking at the regional data (this is the lowest data in the ONS report, but I suspect more detailed information is available elsewhere). The big outlier here is London, which saw weekly deaths increase to 2511 (wk14) and 2832 (wk15) against a trend value of 1047 representing a rate of 240% and 271% respectively. This should represent the peak of deaths in London as the number of new cases started to fall in week 15 which should reduce the death rate in following periods.

The West Midlands and the North East are probably two areas to watch in the coming weeks, the former should be in recovery with a reducing number of cases and deaths, whereas the North East may still peak further (based on regional analyses reported here).