And just like that, 20,000 fewer people died unexpectedly last year, according to the Office for National Statistics. Which is handy for a Government refusing to investigate the excess deaths crisis.
Okay, so we haven’t quite reached North Korean levels of data meddling and history editing. But this does not seem far off.
Under a new methodology, unveiled on Tuesday, the ONS cut excess deaths in 2023 from 31,442 to 10,994 – a 65% drop. This isn’t because the ONS officials suddenly discovered that all these people are actually still alive. The number of people who died last year hasn’t changed. What’s changed is the baseline for determining how many deaths you should expect to happen in a given week, and thus how many that actually occurred are in excess of that baseline.
Previously the ONS used a straightforward five-year baseline, meaning that the expected figure for a given week was simply the average number of deaths in that week in the previous five years (an exception was made following the pandemic, when the ONS dropped 2020 from its five-year averages due to its high death toll).
This simple if crude method is now to be replaced with a complicated model that tries to guesstimate how many deaths you should expect after taking into account factors like the age and size of the population.
Here is what the model looks like as an equation, where each part (i.e., each sigma Σ symbol) stands for a factor that the model is trying to account for:
Not exactly comprehensible to your average politician, journalist, medic or researcher. Indeed, even Professor Carl Heneghan and Dr. Tom Jefferson have confessed that they “do not fully understand the ONS’s new model”.
But is it an improvement?
It comes with an apparent endorsement from Dr. Jason Oke, Senior Statistician at Oxford University’s Medical Statistics Group and a long-time collaborator of Drs. Heneghan and Jefferson. Dr. Oke said:
The excess death statistic rose from relative obscurity to prominence during the pandemic, putting it firmly in the public consciousness.
This, however, also exposed the flaws in the way it had been calculated – using historic averages, taking no account of prevailing trends or changes in the population.
As a result, excess deaths were overestimated before, during and after the pandemic.
Cambridge Emeritus Professor of Statistics Sir David Spiegelhalter was full of praise, calling it a “world-leading methodology, setting an appropriately high standard for national statistics”.
So should we, like these eminent statisticians, welcome the change?
The heavy use of modelling naturally makes anyone who’s been following data in the pandemic highly suspicious. Mathematical models are, by their nature, highly dependent on the assumptions, parameters and inputs their creators feed into them. But perhaps this one is different. Let’s see.
The ONS team has recalculated excess death estimates back to 2011 – the table is shown below. Believe it or not, 2023’s cut of more than 20,000 deaths is not the biggest change, not even close. 2016 was down by over 22,000, 2017 by 21,000, 2018 by over 24,000 and 2019 by – wait for it – over 40,000 deaths. On the face of it it’s hard to credit the claim that the old 2019 baseline was out by more than 40,000 deaths. But let’s continue.
We should put the changes in context. The U.K. sees about 600,000 deaths a year, so a change of 20,000 is in the region of 3% and a change of 40,000 is around 7%. Not huge in relative terms. But equally, 20,000 or 40,000 is not a small number of deaths and can make the difference between a crisis and an ordinary year.
The changes are hugely variable. The years 2011-2013 see small increases in their excess deaths, yet 2016-19 see massive cuts. Then, in the pandemic years, the numbers suddenly stop moving around and stay largely the same (see table below) – which is, again, somewhat handy for the Government as it means it doesn’t need to revise down its scary pandemic death toll by very much.
This raises a key question: why did the underlying population trends that caused the 2019 figure to drop by over 40,000 abruptly (and temporarily) come to an end, so that the 2020 figure drops by just 8,000? Call me cynical, but that’s a big and convenient difference from one year to the next.
The ONS article explaining the change in methodology is helpfully detailed and informative. It anticipates people wondering what’s behind these huge changes and tries to give an answer. Here’s the ONS’s chart of how population size, age and mortality rate – the key variables in the model – have shifted since 2006.
Here we see a steadily increasing population (driven largely by immigration over this period) and a more sharply increasing share of the population aged over 70 – the latter growing by 35% between 2006 and 2023. Note this is a percentage increase since 2006; it does not mean that 35% of the population was over 70 in 2023. In absolute terms the U.K. over-70 population was 11.5% in 2006 and 13.8% in 2023, growing by 2.3 percentage points.
The ONS team explains that in the new model, the ageing and growth of the population counteracts a fall in background mortality rates to produce an overall change in the baseline and excess deaths. The chart below shows the contribution that each factor in the ONS model makes to the changes in excess deaths compared to the current system. The green line shows what this means for the resulting numbers of excess deaths each year.
Here’s the ONS’s explanation of what’s going on:
The U.K. population grew by 12.2% between 2006 and 2023… from 60.8 million to 68.3 million (Figure 3). All else being equal, having more people in the population each year means we can expect more deaths to occur. Furthermore, people aged at least 70 years, the group in which most deaths occur each year, made up an increasing share of the U.K. population (from 11.5% in 2006 to 13.8% in 2023), with the size of this group growing by 35.4% over the period.
Conversely, mortality rates have been decreasing over time. The age-standardised mortality rates (ASMRs) among the U.K. population generally decreased from 2006 to 2011, before levelling off from 2012 to 2018 and dropping again in 2019 (before the start of the pandemic).
These increasing trends in population size and ageing, and the generally decreasing trend in mortality rates, are not accounted for by the current methodology for estimating excess deaths. However, they are reflected in the new methodology.
Interestingly, although the 2023 figure was cut by around 20,500, the 2022 figure actually went up by around 4,500. The 2020 and 2021 figures, on the other hand, were down by around 7,500 and 7,000 respectively. Again, quite a bit of jumping around.
The chart below compares the new and current excess death estimates since the arrival of Covid. It shows that since the second half of 2023 the new estimate has been progressively dropping compared to the current estimate, so much so that an excess has become a deficit. Great news – the excess deaths crisis is over! The Government will be pleased.
While the new methodology certainly looks and sounds sophisticated, taking a step back it’s hard to make any real sense out of it. The changes it has wrought in the excess death figures – represented by the green line in Figure 4 above – are all over the place.
In Figure 3 we saw that the rises in both the general population and the over-70 population since 2006 have been steady; they don’t jump around. Why then do these steady demographic changes result in a jagged and jumping green line of excess death shifts? Why is 2015 adjusted down by 6,000 and 2016 by 23,000? Why is 2018 adjusted by 25,000, 2019 by 40,000 and 2020 by 7,500? These wildly diverging differences from one year to the next make no obvious sense when the underlying population dynamics move only steadily and slowly.
Heneghan and Jefferson in the Telegraph agree that there’s “something fishy about the ONS’s excess death figures”. They note that “while the difference in the total number of recorded deaths between 2020 and 2023 is 27,629, for example, the difference in excess deaths between these years is more than double at 65,418, suggesting that something is amiss with the new estimates”.
They also highlight that for 2022 and 2023, according to the ONS, “by far the biggest contributors to the changed figures are lumped together under the category of ‘other changes’. Quite what’s in this bucket of changes isn’t totally clear, although some of it is to do with the treatment of 2020 data”.
As ever with complex models like this it’s hard to get to the bottom of what exactly is going on, and hence why the model is spewing out such counterintuitive results. But with a string of apparently implausible outputs, it’s reasonable to suspect that the inputs may be faulty. I am wary in particular of the model’s reliance on age-standardised mortality rates (ASMR) and the European Standard Population which I, like statistics expert Professor Norman Fenton, am not convinced are reliable tools for adjusting data.
A further problem is that, despite its complexity, the model fails to take into account one of the biggest factors in play: mortality displacement, i.e., the periods of lower excess deaths that (should) naturally follow on from periods of high excess owing to vulnerable people dying earlier than expected. The ONS article says the team will be looking at including this in a future development of the model. It would, of course, significantly increase the number of excess deaths since 2020.
It should also be noted that the extra deaths in 2023, like in 2022, were not due to the usual diseases of old age, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, which have been in deficit, but were largely due to cardiovascular problems. Deaths have also been up in the younger age groups, not just in the elderly. Both these things count against the idea that an ageing population is playing a large role in recent deaths such as would warrant raising the baseline to cover over them.
With the 2023 figure slashed by 20,000 and data in the second half of the year retroactively altered to transform an excess into a deficit, there is a legitimate worry that the excess deaths crisis is being artificially modelled to a close.
Nonetheless, it is worth stressing that even with these changes, there were still 11,000 excess deaths in 2023 and 43,500 in 2022 – years when Covid was only a minor player and everyone was supposedly protected from the virus by their multiple vaccine boosters.
The ONS can fiddle. But even on the new estimates, tens of thousands of people died unexpectedly in the past two years, and the Government is still showing no interest in finding out why.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
The problem for anyone seeking to minimise excess deaths is that if successful it makes us an outlier across the Western world, whose excess deaths have all been high since 2021.
And with no plausible reason for us to do so much better, the methodology is clearly the differentiator and the excess death problem still unsolved – and as the article says, unexamined. Rome burns whilst the ONS fiddles.
Shouldn’t they revise all excess deaths in prior years according to the same ‘model’ and wouldn’t it then still show current excess in comparison still much higher?
No – changing measurement methods and models half way through a data series has become the norm since climate change became a thing. Changing the past is the future!
I think it’s evident the state will cheerfully kill ppl and cover it up. The distraction of the post office story provides wonderful cover for a few weeks. Then when the PO story loses it legs they have the Nalvany story too. He probably an mi6 agent, I don’t know the details of how he died but hasn’t it provided wonderful cover for the ongoing rout in Ukraine and the tucker interview. The chances of anyone investigating excess deaths caused by our totally evil state are zilch, too much noise to distract ppl.
They will pull a Climate fraud – and realign historical data to what they want. In 2 years time we will be told that 2021-22 had record below average death rates….fewer dead based on some made up metric, the healthiest years evah!…..
Winston Smith’s playbook.
And the Sheeple will believe because the Fake News and Faker Science said so.
Modelling has become the pandora’s box for shady-statisticians and pseudo-scientists everywhere.
Got an inconvenient temperature trend that threatens your Gates Foundation funding? Solution: model it out into something more healthy (for your bank balance).
Faced with explaining rapidly rising excess death rate that is causing questions of your work by politicians that control the purse strings? Solution: yes you guessed it – massage those numbers and ensure your very own happy ending (with early retirement pension contributions).
Trebles all round!
Speaking of temperature trends, you may like: https://youtu.be/OWXX9btymvE?si=pUkiPxcHEA2RGxzi
I’ve not had the time to look at the ONS methodology so can’t comment on that at the moment.
However as soon as you make multiple adjustments like the ONS are doing it becomes impossible to separate real effects from effects that have been created by the modelling. And the layperson has no chance of understanding what is going on.
A non-contentious example of the ONS modelling going wrong was occurred deaths. The ONS until the end of 2023 supplied an estimate for the number of deaths that had occurred each week, as opposed to deaths that had been registered, and this was done using a statistical model that took into account how long it took to register deaths allowing for weekends and bank holidays. The model produced woefully inaccurate figures for deaths that had occurred in the last few weeks, often the last week figure was out by about 10-20%, and then when those deaths had been reported at a later date it was shown to have been a woeful estimate. They have dropped these estimates now.
Of course in that example there was no political incentive for ONS to get the estimates wrong, but there have been many other examples where the ONS modelling seems to have been politically motivated and therein lies the real dangers of this relatively complicated modelling.
While the raw data is important, I do think comparing deaths to a simple 5 year average and reporting that as the headline figure isn’t a good measure of excess mortality. If theoretically the population is ageing and increasing but mortality at each age remains the same, then you reach the position that you expect to have excess deaths every year not because mortality has worsened but because of the ageing and population effects. And you also have the arbitrary decisions to exclude years such as 2020 from the 5 year average when using such a short averaging period.
A simple way to get around the problems of population growth and population ageing is for the ONS to report excess deaths as the percentage increase in deaths in 5 year age groups and as a death rate per million and perhaps comparing it to a static 10 year average, say 2000-2019 average. Once a decade the 10 year average years can be jumped on and figures rebased historically. Apart from the 10 year average, the data is all there post 2020, as deaths are reported in 5 year age groups, and the ONS produces single age population estimates also which while estimated are good enough. And before 2020 they have this same data it’s just that they have never published it in 10 year age groups, although they did supply a 5 year age group figure for 2015-2019 in a bespoke dataset.
When you do that you see clearly what is going on without the need for inaccessible (to most) modelling adjustments. That is it shows the significant excess mortality in working ages that has continued relentlessly up to now. Whereas in the oldest age groups, mortality displacement is likely the main effect with mortality rates being relatively normal. Because total deaths are only very marginally affected numerically by working age deaths, this excess mortality in working ages gets missed. And age standardised mortality doesn’t really reflect working age mortality at all because that element is swamped by deaths in the oldest ages.
You can then make a sensible compare of excess mortality by 5 year age groups. You also see that mortality was improving by about 1.2%pa in every banded age group up to 2019. And that is why the ONS have been working (and I think still do) on a long term mortality improvement basis of 1.2%pa. When you factor that in you see that the increases in mortality in working ages is on top of the 1.2%pa mortality improvement that hasn’t happened since 2019.
An example of what this sort of structured analysis produces is in the attached chart (albeit I’m forced to use the 2015-2019 average through lack of published data). That is not intended as a full analysis but as an illustration of the sort of output. But in line with the thinking of keeping things simple as possible, but no simpler approach, that is what I would suggest. You need to split into age groups and adjust for population so as not to make things too simple, but doing that still leaves excess mortality understandable by the layperson as far as is possible.
Brilliant post – totally agree. I think the final chart is excellent – a chart I doubt the ONS or their puppet masters want anyone to see.
I was surprised to learn, during the Covid years, that data in deaths and probable cause were poorly recorded and sloppily reported.
it is rare for a dead to be undetected for more than an hour or two, overnight maybe if the deceased lived alone. There is significant value in prompt reporting together with probable cause. The cause can be updated later if a post morgen is done but knowing promptly can help identify criminality, incompetence and trends.
In addition to the anomalies identified above, the data on age makes me raise an eyebrow. The hundreds of thousands of immigrants pouring into the country are mainly working-age men. According to Oxford University’s Migration Observatory, “An estimated 20% of the UK-born were at least 65 years old in 2021, compared to 12% of migrants.”. Presumably, these data don’t take into account the numerous immigrants who are not ‘on the books’ as it were.
We are in a time where trust in the political and medical establishment is at an all time low.
People have expressed their concerns regarding the number of excess deaths.
Rather than trying to investigate why, the first thing we hear, is a shift of goal posts by changing the method of calculating excess deaths.
Do they really think that this will rebuild any trust? Do they really think this will make the concerns about excess deaths go away?
And by the way, the UK is not the only country to change the method of calculating excess deaths. The Dutch have done something similar by now incorporating 2020 in the 5-year average, thereby increasing the baseline.
They should get Prof Pantsdown to create a new model.
That would “prove” that there haven’t been any excess deaths whatsoever ….. in fact, those who were recorded as having died were miraculously resurrected by “our wonderful NHS” and are now going to live for 200 years, thanks to the jabby jabby cocktail.
Love it
What are the actuarial models saying? They have to make a profit on the life insurance so if excess deaths are going up then so are rates.
Here is the Off-G version.
https://off-guardian.org/2024/02/21/why-is-the-ons-suddenly-changing-the-excess-deaths-numbers/
“The end result is that, from 2020 onwards, excess mortality has been cut by ~15%. Over 30,000 “excess deaths” have been wiped off the records, over 20,000 from 2023 alone, and the vast majority since the vaccine rollout.”
How convenient.
I had a good laugh and stopped reading after ‘world leading’.
Whenever those words are muttered by a modern day Brit, you know it’s a desperate and total disaster and con.
Clearly this fiddling with statistics is being done for a purpose. For we Sceptics this is a deliberately underhand way of altering the figures in the authorities favour. And that is indeed my view. For the sheeple however this serves the purpose of confirming how successful the “vaccines” were and underlines the “safe and effective” propoganda. Marvellous. As an added bonus it drags the wavering sheeple back in to the fold and confirms that we Sceptics are indeed mad as tuberculous badgers. And of course figures fiddling helps to confuse the issue of excess deaths for everyone.
As we already know the mortality figures have clearly been doctored
since at least 2019 and so these further enhancements – ahem – are only a deliberate extrapolation of that process.
It is all supremely Orwellian.
How fitting.
We have always been at war with Oceania.
We only have to look around.
No need for stats. It’s bleedin’ obvious!
Unless you’re living in ‘Fluffyland’.
I’ve been using an age and trend adjusted method for calculating expected deaths since early 2020: I based it on the period of 2011-2018 (8 years) and for each age group calculated the overall straight line trend. I then calculate the seasonal variation by measuring the weekly differences from the trend and averaging those (eg for people aged 75-84 week 6 of the year is on average x% over the eight year trend line). With the straight line trend and seasonal weekly variation in death rates for each age group we can project forward and calculate expected deaths for the number of people in the age group. I could and should probably have done the same calculations for males and females separately; but I didn’t.
The output of that process is a calculated expected death rate for each age group for each week of the year. Multiply by population estimates to calculate expected deaths forward into 2019-2023 and the future. This method stumbles slightly when there are 53 weeks in a year as happened in 2015 and 2020.
in England and Wales in 2019 we had unusually low death rates – considerably fewer people died than expected. By my calculation, about 13,500 fewer people died than expected. These were frail people who we had expected to die but who were still alive when the bug arrived… We can take this number straight off the top of the excess death count for 2020. It’s a crude term and some may find it offensive but these were the ‘dry kindling’ of the crisis.
In 2020 by my calculation we had about 59,500 excess deaths. If we take off the 13,500 that means we had 46,000 more deaths than we would have had in a normal year. If we compare that with the 86,240 claimed number of ‘Covid mentioned of the death certificate’ deaths we find that Covid deaths were about 87% overstated. If we don’t take the ‘dry kindling’ into account Covid was only 45% overstated for England and Wales.
If instead we take ONS’ figures for excess the Covid deaths in 2020 were only 18% overstated for the whole of Great Britain. If we take into account their estimate of ‘dry kindling’ still alive in 2020 then Covid deaths were overstated by 177%
To quote ToF: There was no pandemic
Thanks for doing the graft. Numbers and sums are not particularly interesting to me but your conclusions make for good reading.
Missed the edit windows.
I wanted to update to point out: Of course, all the ‘dry kindling’ from the previous year dying over just a few weeks was bound to cause disruption and panic.
“…was intended to cause disruption and panic.”
And if we factor in the deaths caused by anti-COVID measures rather than COVID deaths, the latter is even more overstated.
An embarrassed Government being pressurised to investigate high excess deaths which would likely show it was responsible, disappears high excess deaths.
ONS = Obfuscating Nefarious Shenanigans.
Should be renamed to OPD, Office for Plausible Deniability.
Snake Oil. Smoke and Mirrors.
The maths is above my head unfortunately. I’d love for independent statisticians to weigh in on this.
2.3 on 11.5 percentage point rise in elderly is not the 30-odd percent claimed.
if the data preciously presented was so poor who has suffered a career set-back for all those data.
I do not agree it is OK to be 3% or 8% wrong when reporting a statistic such as deaths of humans in this country. Deaths must be reported by law to a central quango or agency so there is no complexity about it.
the numbers should be very accurate and available within a day or two of the end of the reporting period. Why do public bodies make a hash of everything they do.
Put simply, I no longer believe a single thing broadcast, published, shared, or spouted by the establishment or its crones. Everything is a lie.
Believe nothing, question everything!
Everything spewed forth by them is either propaganda, lies, or psyops.
The equation given is simply nonsense, clever but nonsense none the less. As for the alleged error bounds, there should be none, one has accurate data. In other words this set of equations simply fit a curve to the data, which minimises the obvious changes, and allocates them to statistical”error”. As I said, basically “C**P”.
The real question is, who asked the ONS to refigure excess deaths? The other question, where on earth are the legal experts in this country seeking FOI requests? Where are the UK versions of Dr. Battacharya,
the investigative reporting of Li Fang, Del Bigtree and ICAHN, the lawsuits against the misinformation, putting lives at risk.
Ask the Actuaries