Scotland mortality 2022 week 33
Summary of Scotland’s mortality and excess mortality. All data mortality and population data via National Records of Scotland
Overall
In this most recent update
Prior week 32 was revised up to +13% (134 more deaths than normal).
Week 33 is initially +17% (172 more deaths than normal).
In this recent trend of excess we have 2,709 more deaths than should be expected. Overall mortality is worse than to the same point in 2021 - 2,315 excess deaths in 2021, 2,343 this year.
Scotland is not a large nation so these numbers can sound small. Here are Scotland’s excess mortality numbers scaled to the size of some other nations
Summary of Summer
As the below chart shows, we have more total deaths, of course more excess deaths, AND more COVID DEATHS than during the prior two summers.
And the Z-score (the measure of how unusual this is) remains extremely high, much higher indeed than Winter 2020.
Excess mortality by Location, by cause, by age
By location of death, the excess continued to be people dying at home, as has been the case since the start.
Looking at excess mortality by cause, the primary excess comes from the ever present ‘Others’, but the second is a very large excess of cancer deaths. Unlike ‘others’ the cancer is just one week, so we need to see how it will be in coming weeks.
Looking by age, all of the older groups are in excess (the older the group, the higher the excess). All of the younger groups are below normal.
Same data but showing percentage excess, we can see the most vulnerable (all of 75+) are back to 20% excess mortality. The protection boost appears not to be having the announced effect.
Mortality in children
Looking firstly at the infants (<1 year old), all is normal. We had the three spikes in the recent months, but those have settled and all is currently normal.
Looking next at age 1-14, and again fairly normal. There was a recent high spike (and that makes Q3 average look high), but it was not an unprecedented level, and recent weeks have stabilised at a low level (below the 5 year average)
So yet another bad week. The second summer of very high, very atypical mortality, and the second summer where the media seems blind to this, despite that this period in 2021 saw as many deaths as Lockdown Spring 2020.
What is worrying is that it’s the elderly that are predominantly passing away in high numbers. Measures like ASMR will undercount that, but with the vulnerable having sadly been taken early (during 2020 and 2021), those deaths would have been ‘pulled forward’ and we should be seeing LOWER mortality than normal now. We are not, instead it’s much higher, which is a real cause for concern.
We will keep publishing these analyses week by week, and developing thoughts and trends that we see.
Best wishes!
Scottish Unity, Edinburgh Group
Scotland mortality 2022 week 33
My wife did a quick analysis of the raw data (the same dataset as you used - we think) and discovered that for Q1 2022, male excess deaths are up a lot (+330 ) and females down a lot (-300) so they are cancelling out. This seems strange. Also male deaths 55-64 are +105 and females +30. It looks like there's a big difference between the sexes (at least my wife is happy!)