[gazillionaire]

Maddening that they don't manage to present clear data points - deliberately, or because they don't know any better?

Like what is the point of comparing flu deaths between January and August with Covif219 deaths in the same time period? Perhaps those two diseases have different seasons? (Maybe not, but they way they present it, it is impossible to know). Perhaps all the flu deaths happen in December and all the Corona deaths in March? (Just an example). Also for example Sweden had exceptionally few deaths last years, leaving exceptionally many people "ripe to die" this year (what Marginal Revolution calls the "Dry Cinder Effect").

Also comparing to averages can also be very misleading. It is in fact to be expected that any given year deviates from the average. It would be very odd if every year was exactly on the average.

Then in the middle of comparing death rates of previous years, they seem to jump to absolute counting of Covid19 deaths again ("The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show"). When the whole point of looking a death rates of previous years is to establish how many excess deaths were really attributable to Covid19.

[marstall]

exactly. to boot, if you look at death rates for all of the UK, they have been on an upward trend for the past several years so it is no surprise that deaths would higher this year than in any year in the past five years https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/GBR/united-kingdom/dea...

[mcguire]

UK death rate, 2015: 9.179 / 1000; 2020: 9.413.

Calculated total deaths, 2015 (pop. 64.85 million): 595,258.15; 2020 (pop. 67.89 million): 639,048.57.

Difference: 43,790.42. Weekly averages: 11,000 - 12,000.

See Figure 1, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... for a chart of England's excess mortality.

"In week 16 2020, an estimated 22,351 all-cause deaths were registered in England and Wales (source: Office for National Statistics). This is an increase compared to the 18,516 estimated death registrations in week 152020. ... In the devolved administrations,no statistically significant excess all-cause mortality for all ages was observed for Northern Ireland or Wales in week 17. Statistically significant excess all-cause mortality for all ages was observed for Scotland in week 15." (https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...)

It looks like the peak occurred in week 17, with 22,351 deaths.