Excess Deaths in the England and Wales - Latest Update

I've been mulling this one over for a while - trying to find a better way to represent what is happening, the size of the issue and the key numbers. Although the table I produced last time was OK, it didn't really work for me on all levels.

So... based on the latest data from the ONS the top line trends look like this:

Clearly we can see the number of deaths registered weekly as reported by the ONS for week 17 (week ending April 24th) is considerably above the average for the last 5 years. However in the most recently published data, it is good to see that the gap is no longer growing, which fits with the flattening of daily fatality numbers reported in government briefings around the same time.

If we take the worst case scenario, ignoring the lower number of deaths earlier in the year, and just compare week 10 to week 17 to the average we get the chart below. At this point it's important to note that these numbers portray a false sense of accuracy, so are best read to the nearest hundred, I work in absolutes to ensure the calculations add up, but the underlying data will be more variable so this level of accuracy is spurious. 

Since week 10 we have had approximately 38500 more deaths above trend (aka excess deaths), for the same period the ONS is reporting 29710 Covid-19 deaths which would leave a further 8800 (approx) deaths excess deaths as yet unexplained. In all likelihood a high percentage of these may well be Covid-19 deaths as well.  

However, there is a lag in the ONS data and the latest week is under-reported and subsequently 'topped up' the week after. An estimate for this top up is shown in the ONS Forecast column above, so I would expect the true reported figure to be closer to 32,000 deaths from Covid-19, leaving a figure in the region of 6400 unexplained excess deaths for weeks 10-17. So whilst the underlying number of Covid-19 deaths are likely to be higher than reported bye the ONS, the difference is starting to settle out at about one-sixth of excess deaths. It'll be interesting to see what number the media starts to announce as we move forward. 

I've included the daily Government briefing figures as well for completeness - these figures will always be lower than reality due to the speed of reporting and limited coverage of settings, but seem to be steadily running at about 80% of the final ONS figures and 60-65% of the level of excess deaths.