Obviously we don't yet know what happens for the next few months... but my reaction to looking at those graphs, is that in terms of number of excess deaths it's similar to a flu epidemic - a bad flu epidemic, and quite a bit worse than most of those, but not loads and loads worse.
It's estimated that only a tiny proportion of people have actually had the virus tho.
Exactly frogwoman. The impact on mortality so far resembles a bad influenza epidemic or pandemic, but the crucial point is that thats what it looks like so far with a lockdown. A lockdown that was late and soft in various ways, but still major mitigation. The data doesnt tell us what it would have looked like without a lockdown, and I am glad we didnt get to find out.
So the claim that should be made when comparing it to the last 50 years of influenza and other deaths, is that 'even with the uk lockdown it resembles the bad influenza pandemic that we had at the end of 1969/start of 1970'. Or 'even with the uk lockdown it had a peak death rate higher than any influenza epidemic of the last 50 years'. Its hard to imagine how I would be able to make those claims if the lockdown (and the steps before it that caused people to start to change behaviour lots a week before) had been done earlier.
It is of course necessary to see what happens next, I barely have enough data to really place this year in context yet. But since some people were interested in the pattern of previous years, here is a full representation of the daily death data from 1970-2018 (I dont have any for 2019 yet). The scales are too small to read but they are the same as they were on the individual year graphs I posted earlier. With this one each row shows a decade, so the first row is the 1970s and the last the 2010's. And I have placed the provisional figures so far for March and April 2020 at the start and end of every row so that it is a bit easier to start to compare this pandemic spike of death so far to all of those decades.
I'm not actually obsessed with peak death rate, its just a convenient way to make historical comparisons. And I'm certainly going to take note when in April we had days with more death on those days than there has been on any other day in my lifetime (born 1975). Still its the total deaths that really matter, but the spikes are strong indicators, and they are what people tend to notice with graphs like these. Due to a lack of May data of this type, the shape of the 2020 pandemic spike as presented above may be misleading, the downward curve is not really accurately shown yet. And that obviously makes quite a difference to total deaths.
When I get round to studying the historical excess mortality data of Germany compared to this country, I expect I will have lots more to say about deaths at times other than this pandemic, how I wish we could do better as a country all the time, especially every winter. How nothing will make up for the lives lost in this pandemic, but that we could at least try to permanently change our priorities so that large orders of magnitude of deaths could be prevented in future.
www.mirror.co.uk
