The ONSet of Doom? Part II

In my previous post I looked at the ONS death registration data for England & Wales for the years 2015 - 2021.

The ONSet of Doom?

There wasn’t anything new in this - we all know excess deaths have been a problem (a real conundrum, I tell you!) for some time.

It’s probably climate change wot dun it, so get eating those bugs and skateboarding everywhere (as long as it’s within 15 minutes of where you live).

I decided to be as active as the Super-Duper-OhMyGod-Arcturus-CoviMutantDoom is in India right now and look at the 2022 figures from the ONS. The dataset I picked up is listed as provisional.

Sarcasm aside (and briefly), I split the data into 4-week chunks, took the average weekly death of that chunk, and plotted the results as a function of the weekly chunk number. You can find more details in the previous article.

I then wanted to look at the excess death as a percentage of a baseline. The baseline I took was the average data from 2016 - 2019.

Here’s what the average weekly death chart looks like

So, for example, data point 17 (on the x-axis) represents the 4th chunk of 4 weeks in 2020 and we can see that in this 4-week chunk the average death, per week, in the over 85’s was about 7,000.

As I stated in the previous article, it seems that the under 45’s were not particularly affected by the whole covid malarkey, but this is a bit deceiving because when you look at the excess death as a percentage of the baseline we can see a different picture.

I’m hampered a bit by the large age ranges in the ONS datasets for 2016-2019 (needed to determine a baseline), but I don’t have access to a more fine-grained dataset. The data is also death registration data which can have time lags, and is not ideal.

These caveats notwithstanding, the data is still more than adequate to indicate the worrying trends we all know about.

The excess death as a percentage chart looks like this

From mid-2021 there’s something of an alarmingly persistent excess death in people over the age of 15 that can be seen in this chart.

It’s a conundrum. If we look at the various articles published by the mainstream¹ media then it's caused by climate change, or excess gardening, or over-vigorous duvet shaking, or eating breakfast, or not eating breakfast, or your electricity bill. Personally, I think it's the Faeries of Doom that live just behind my compost heap at the bottom of my garden. The heart-rending cries of the hedgehogs in the night as they are buggered² by these eldritch beings cannot be described.

Other people, the Pfools, think it might, possibly, just about, have something to do with some Pharma Pfuckery that we were subjected to. As Saint Albert himself said, anyone who questions the Glorious Goo of Goodness should be in jail.

In the UK, the 2nd Dose of Delight started to kick off around data point 16 in the chart above (week 12 in the chart below).

So, let’s zoom in on the data after data point 16 (that’s after the first 12 weeks of 2021).

And there you have it. To quote myself, we have fucked up.

Personally, I think we’ve Pfucked up - but I’m just an anti-science freak.

1. Mainstream, as in being showered by the main stream of rancid piss that these august institutions put out

2. In this, Sir Terry Pratchett was wrong