Thread by @COVID19actuary

The Continuous Mortality Investigation (CMI) has published its latest Mortality Monitor to 3 December (week 48).

There were 3% more deaths this week than if death rates were the same as week 48 of 2019. That is 383 excess deaths in England and Wales this week.

CMI calculates 116,900 excess deaths in the UK since the start of the pandemic, of which 44,000 occurred in 2021.

Cumulative mortality YTD is 6.3% of a full year's mortality above 2019, though for now it remains lower than 2012, 2013, 2015 and of course 2020.

This analysis of death rates shows significantly fewer excess deaths than COVID deaths this week, as was also the case last week. This follows a long period where the calculated excess was consistently similar to the number of COVID deaths each week.

There’s an interesting pattern by age. Excess mortality relative to expected death rates has generally been higher at ages below 75 since mid-year. That gap widened further recently with very low, or even negative excess deaths at the oldest ages.

It is of course highly unusual to see sustained runs of excess deaths. The run of 22 weeks to day is the longest the CMI has seen through the pandemic.

Full report publicly available here: actuaries.org.uk/system/files/f…