An improved measure of deaths due to COVID-19 in England and Wales

‘How many deaths in England and Wales are due to COVID-19?’ An ‘excess deaths’ measure of COVID deaths is preferable, but a limitation of the current metric (a comparison to a 5 year average for the same week), is that it attributes all the variation in mortality to COVID-19. This likely means the m...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Williams Sam, Crookes Alasdair, Karligash Glass, Anthony Glass
Format: Default Report
Published: 2020
Subjects:
Uncategorised value
Demographics
Deviations from the mean estimate
Mean COVID deaths estimate
Lockdown policy
Overreporting of COVID deaths
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/2134/12579629.v1
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:‘How many deaths in England and Wales are due to COVID-19?’ An ‘excess deaths’ measure of COVID deaths is preferable, but a limitation of the current metric (a comparison to a 5 year average for the same week), is that it attributes all the variation in mortality to COVID-19. This likely means the metric is overstated because there are other drivers of mortality. We account for other drivers including the lockdown using novel Poisson models for deaths (in totality; by age category; for males; and females). Novel COVID identifier variables (a variation on a dummy variable) are used to estimate weekly deviations in COVID deaths about the mean weekly estimate. For 17 or 24 April 2020 - 8 May 2020, we predict that total weekly COVID deaths are considerably below the 5 year average excess deaths – on average per week, 4670 or 4727 deaths lower (54% or 63% lower, respectively).

Similar Items