This is the UK Government’s website, GOV.UK. In the search field, we’ll be searching for “excess
mortality”. In this video, we’ll be looking at Excess mortality in England and English
regions. These are the official figures from the Office of Health Improvement and Disparities,
which were last updated on 1 December 2022. Scrolling down to the Documents section,
we’ll be looking at the Excess mortality in England Analysis.
This brings us to an interactive data visualisation tool of excess deaths,
which are presented by age, sex, deprivation, ethnicity, region, local authority, cause and
place of death. We’ll be looking at a few of these in more details in this presentation.
It should be noted that excess deaths are estimated using five years of data
from 2015 to 2019. Also of note, in the Interpretation section,
the authors note that “mortality rates do vary considerably from year to year
and we have no way of knowing what would have happened, had the pandemic not occurred”. So
just keep that in mind. These statistics that I’ll be showing you are all just estimates.
First of all, let’s look at all excess deaths in the year 2022. We can see that at the start of
the year, there were considerably less deaths that expected, but from about April onwards,
there were considerably more than expected, and have been consistently higher throughout the
year. I spoke about that in a previous video, so I won’t go into that again.
If we go back to the main menu and click on Cause of Death, specifically Heart failure,
we can see that there have been significant increases
in heart failure throughout most of the year. The jury is still out as to why,
but nobody can argue that heart failure is significantly higher than historical averages.
Here’s a graph of excess deaths from other respiratory diseases, such as influenza,
and as you can see, there have been significantly less deaths than expected. Presumably,
instead of people dying from the flu, they’ve been officially dying
from COVID instead. That’s why I’ve always been hesitant to state that all COVID deaths
should be counted as excess deaths. No, they shouldn’t, because fewer people are dying from
other respiratory illnesses. COVID deaths have just displaced some of those deaths.
This graph shows deaths from heart disease. Again, there have been significant increases
throughout the year. People may not be dying very much from the flu,
but they certainly are dying from heart disease in great numbers.
Another cause of death that has been severely over-represented in 2022 is deaths from cirrhosis
and other liver diseases. According to the British NHS, the main causes of cirrhosis
are excess alcohol consumption, hepatitis, and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease caused by a
build-up of excess fat, usually seen in people who are overweight or obese. I presume these are all
hangovers of the pandemic lockdowns where people were stuck at home all day, without work, and
unable to socialise and exercise as normal. This certainly warrants further investigation I think.
Similarly, diabetes numbers are significantly higher than
normal throughout almost the entire year. Again, according to the NHS,
diabetes is often linked to people being overweight or inactive.
Perhaps surprisingly, deaths from dementia and Alzheimer's has been
mostly lower than expected throughout the year,
as has deaths from Parkinson’s disease, or at least, it’s stayed fairly average.
Some viewers have been asking about ethnicity in relation to excess deaths. White people have
pretty much followed the overall trend. Asian people have seen consistent excess
deaths throughout the entire year, even in the earlier months. Somewhat similarly,
black people have shown mostly increases in deaths through most weeks of the year, as have people of
self-described ‘mixed’ ethnicity. The only group that don’t follow a similar pattern are people who
identify as “other”, meaning they don’t identify as white, black, Asian, or mixed. Throughout the
year, they’ve had ups and downs that pretty much average out in terms of excess deaths.
Place of death is somewhat informative. Deaths in hospitals have pretty much
followed the overarching trend. Deaths in care homes has kind of followed the
same trend, except that there are significantly less excess deaths.
Deaths in hospices have completely plummeted. I guess people are just not going to hospices
as often anymore? But the standout in excess deaths is at home. Significantly more people
have been dying at home throughout the entire year than historical averages.
Older people have pretty much been following the overarching excess death trend,
but perhaps surprisingly, 50 to 64 year-olds have had consistent excess deaths almost every
week of the year. 25-49 year-olds have sort of had a similar pattern with some significant
excess deaths early on in the year as well. Whereas the youngest age category, 0 to 24
year-olds have had ups and downs, but mainly highly-than­-expected deaths in recent months.
So what can we conclude from all of this data? Well, people are dying more often
from heart failure, heart disease, cirrhosis of the liver, diabetes, they’re of mixed ethnicity,
50 to 64 years old, with significantly increased deaths at home. And nobody seems to know why.