Call for action after rise in number of deaths

THERE have been more than 10,000 “additional deaths” in Wales and England over the first few weeks of the year, experts have said.

A new editorial published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) highlights that during the first seven weeks of 2018 there were 93,990 deaths in Wales and England, but over the same weeks in the previous five years an average of 83,615 people died.

This is a rise of 12.4%, or “10,375 additional deaths”, argue Lucinda Hiam from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Danny Dorling from the University of Oxford.

The editorial comes after a senior health official acknowledged that mortality was “over and above” what is expected.

During a recent Science and Technology Committee hearing, Professor Paul Cosford, medical director at Public Health England, said: “One of the things we monitor is the increase in mortality on a week-to-week basis over and above what we would normally expect for this time of year.

“We know that there has been a period of about four weeks or so during which that mortality has been higher than we would have expected.

“[In] week six [the week ending February 11] there is about 11,300 or so deaths in an average year in that week but we have had probably about 12,400/12,500. So it is that sort of increase over a defined period.”

The new editorial in The BMJ claims that an additional person died every seven minutes during the first 49 days of 2018 compared with what had been usual in the previous five years.

But the authors said that deaths from flu were not unusually high – accounting for 18.7% of deaths – and the weather during this time was above average.