I didn’t see any mention of the topic in your blog, but curious about your thoughts on the pandemic “accelerating” deaths. I would expect to begin to see a few periods of lower than historical deaths due to the acceleration of deaths during the pandemic. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence of that in 2022.
The continued high levels in 2022 seem even worse than what your graphs are showing. (suicides, drugs overdoses and homicides must really be increasing)
If it’s accelerating deaths, it would be among the oldest (age 85+)
So, the age 85+ mortality rate was actually lower in 2021 than in 2020 (forget about 2022). COVID may have cleared out “dry tinder”.
It was still higher than in 2019, though.
COVID was >100% of their excess mortality in 2021:
so perhaps COVID killed off the very old who would have died of heart disease, cancer, Alzheimers, chronic lower respiratory disease, etc.In 2021. Some of them.
But it would really only apply to those over age 80 or so.
Technically, they’re all accelerated.
A bounce-back would presume that the deaths were among those likely to die sooner than the average.
Finalized 2021 stats got uploaded to CDC WONDER, so I’m updating all my graphs, etc.
First things first – cause of death ranking tables!
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I’ll put this here: World's oldest person, French nun Sister André, dies aged 118 - BBC News
So the CSO table ending at 121 is still intact. 
Been posted a bunch of times in various places on GoA.
Generally speaking the thread for the oldest person dying is here:
United Kingdom
I’m going to excerpt one bit, because it’s being misleading –
But there is a hole in this argument: excess deaths are a problem in a number of other high-income countries, where the “NHS is broken” argument doesn’t hold. According to EuroMOMO, a European mortality monitoring activity supported by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO), many European countries are showing elevated levels of excess mortality in all age groups — around 35% above average — and did so throughout 2022. In fact, despite relatively low Covid death rates, overall excess deaths in all age groups in Europe in 2022 were as high as in 2020 and higher than 2021 — even in the oldest cohorts. Beyond Europe, the situation is much the same: Australia and New Zealand recorded, respectively, 16% and 9% more excess deaths than the historical average in 2022, while in the United States, CDC data shows that the rate of non-Covid excess deaths in the first half of 2022 was even higher than in 2020 or 2021.
Except a lot of non-COVID excess mortality in the U.S. is from external causes, as in homicides, motor vehicle accidents, and drug overdoses. I highly doubt that’s the route they want to go down, but who knows.
I have found some non-COVID excess outside the external causes, but it’s less stark than homicide, to be sure. There have been increases for a variety of causes of death, mainly heart disease, some diabetes. It differs by age group, of course.
I haven’t seen much movement on cancer.
Did some videos
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Splitting out the cause of death ranking tables by sex and age (and year) 2018-2021
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This thread:
https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1641799627128143873
fwiw, I did message the author re: the CDC WONDER data before he wrote the piece. I don’t have a FT subscription, so I can’t see all he wrote.
Some of what’s in there absolutely accords with what I’ve been writing about excess mortality in young adults in U.S. 2020-2021 (and it looks like 2022 as well)-- I think motor vehicle accident deaths did come down, as did homicides a little, but drug ODs are still elevated as far as I can tell.
Not a trend, just mortality:
Story references Notes from the Field: Cluster of Blastomycosis Among Neighborhood Residents — St. Croix County, Wisconsin, 2022 | MMWR
Hopefully it doesn’t make you want to bite people.
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Looks like the UK is going to see a material drop in life expectancy at 65. About 6 months (2% less) relative to 2021 via the CMI 2022 projection model.
Thats a pretty big mortality hit over the course of a non-pandemic year.
We don’t have the drug problems the US has but we do have a serious healthcare availability problem. Excess deaths are now being driven by lack of timely available healthcare at older ages (NHS backlog is at 7 million procedures and climbing due to current strikes by nurses and junior doctors).
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Which non-pandemic year are you talking about?
Non-Pandemic:
2022 (UK)
Pandemic:
2020 (UK)
2021 (UK)
We had different timelines vs US due to lockdowns and vaccines.
:squintyeyes:
Uh, I don’t think so. I mean, maybe that’s some sort of official classification or something, but Covid is still around and it’s still killing people. Not as bad as 2020, but it’s still killing people. The whole world over. Which includes the UK.
Excess deaths in 2022 are well below 2020 and 2021 due to covid. The ONS and Actuarial profession both agreed on this difference when building the 2022 CMI model.
You need to realise that more of the UK is actually fully vaccinated vs the US (80% vs 70%).
Sure, people are still dying from covid but its not happening in clusters like in the US (anti-vaxxers tend to be concentrated into groups), which has reduced excess deaths by a material amount.
In the UK, excess deaths are now driven by deteriorating healthcare access (mortality in 2022 is running at about 4.8% higher vs 2019).