Where angels fear to tread

Some weeks ago, there was much talk of excess deaths, roughly speaking deaths in excess of what might be expected in a normal year, of what had been experienced in recent years. Talk which seems to have died down, perhaps because in most places the necessary statistical systems are not in place.

In a similar vein, yesterday evening, I started to wonder what proportion of the Covid-19 related deaths in rich western countries could be accounted for by their having relatively large numbers of very old people - something which I assume to be the case, without having checked.

So this morning I take myself off to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), that is to say reference 1, and very quickly find myself at reference 2. From where I am able to download an Excel workbook for Table 2, that is to say the number of deaths due to COVID-19 by age-group, England and Wales, deaths occurring between March and June 2020. A far cry from all the hoops that a customer would have had to have jumped through in the days when I worked for OPCS in the 1970's, then the responsible outfit for this sort of thing, now gathered into ONS.

A little fiddling about in which gets me to the table above. Which, assuming I have not made a mistake (all too probable in my case, being rather accident prone in such matters), tells me that these deaths are indeed very much among the very old, with the over 80's accounting for getting on for two thirds of the total (of something over 45,000 deaths). So excess deaths in the sense that there would be a lot fewer of them if there were a lot fewer old people in the first place. Which I am supposing to be the case in much of, for example, Africa, where, as previously noticed at reference 4, they seem to be getting off relatively lightly.

I remember back in the late 1980's when I was rooming in the same house as a young railwayman on secondment from Kampala, him telling me that, back home, one did not see many healthy and active people in their sixties. Let alone older husbands and wives decorating the inside of their houses together. As I remember it, part of that story was that Ugandan husbands did not get involved in that side of things.

In any event, the sort of thing that WHO might done some work on. So off to reference 3 when I surface from my morning duties.

PS 1: click to enlarge to read the table above.

PS 2: later: first accident now corrected. Omission of the comma separator need in larger numbers for legibility. Prompting excursion into HTML needed to tidy things up.

Reference 1: https://www.ons.gov.uk/.

Reference 2: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/deathsinvolvingcovid19englandandwales.

Reference 3: https://www.who.int/.

Reference 4: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/10/tanzania.html.