Excess deaths remain above pre-pandemic levels although rates appear at last to be dropping, according to the latest published mortality data.
Figures from the Continuous Mortality Investigation (CMI) show that there have been a 204,700 excess deaths in the UK since the start of the pandemic, when compared to expected mortality rates. This covers all causes, not just Covid.
Of these excess deaths, 75,600 occurred in 2020, 56,500 in 2021, and 39,400 in 2022. To date there have been 33,200 excess deaths in the first three quarters of this year. The CMI says the rate of excess deaths in the last three months, while still high when compared to 2019, is at a lower level than in the previous five quarters – as shown in the chart below.
The CIM figures also reveal there were 2,165 deaths registered in the UK in the third quarter of 2023 with Covid-19 mentioned on the death certificate, which is nearly 50 per cent of the total number of excess deaths in the third quarter of 2023.
The CMI Mortality Projections committee chair Cobus Daniel says that the organisations will stop calculating excess mortality after the end of this year. The organisation says that will this was informative early in the pandemic, this calculation of excess deaths becomes more subjective the further we get from our pre-pandemic benchmark year of 2019.
The CMI says it will continue including measures of expected or excess deaths in the mortality monitor until week 1 of 2024. After that, it will include standardised mortality rates in the monitor, this will enable a comparison of mortality between yers, but it will not make the comparison to 2019 such a prominent feature of its output.