UPDATE 09/06/2020 to include data up to w/e May 29th.
One visualisation shows it all
Last week I created three visualisations from the ONS data for England and Wales. Today, updated data has been released and as well as updating the previous graphs, I have created a visual to compare the weekly death rates in 2020 against the five year average of 2015 to 2019.
As you can see there are a number of deaths above the expected average which are not directly associated with COVID-19. We can be reasonably sure that the COVID-19 pandemic was the cause of these deaths, but are they direct deaths where COVID-19 was not noted on the death certificate or deaths indirectly associated with COVID-19, i.e. heart attacks where a patient has not gone to A&E.
A few points to note:
- Some deaths that have been attributed to COVID-19 would have happened without the pandemic, i.e. natural causes.
- This data is based on the registration of deaths and not the day the death occurred and so there is a lag on the most recent data.
- This dataset is updated weekly (on Tuesdays) and I will look to add the most recent information as it is published.
I have built and shared this visualisation in Microsoft PowerBI. I am interested to hear any feedback you might have on the presentation of the data or the wider implications of what the data is showing.