Mortality levels in the UK remain above pre-pandemic levels, with more than 33,000 excess deaths for the first three quarters of 2023, according to the Continuous Mortality Investigation (CMI).
The CMI, which is a part of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA), publishes frequent UK mortality analysis through its mortality monitor. It has published weekly updates since April 2020 that focus on Covid-19 and ‘excess mortality’.
The latest report, released yesterday, covers the third quarter of 2023, up to 29 September.
The update showed that In the UK, there were about 204,700 more registered deaths from all causes than expected from the start of the pandemic to 29 September 2023.
Of those, 75,600 deaths occurred in 2020, with 56,500 deaths in 2021, 39,400 in 2022, and 33,200 in the first three quarters of 2023.
But the excess deaths in the third quarter were at a lower level than the previous five quarters.
There were 2,165 deaths registered in the UK in the third quarter of 2023 with Covid mentioned on the death certificate, which is nearly 50% of the total number of excess deaths in the third quarter of 2023.
That compares to earlier in the year, when the first three months of 2023 saw the highest number of excess deaths in the UK since the start of the second wave of the pandemic.
The CMI defines excess deaths as the difference between actual deaths in a week, and those that it would have expected if mortality rates had been the same as in the corresponding week of 2019.
But the CMI said it intended to stop calculating excess mortality after 2023.
“While monitoring excess deaths was informative early in the pandemic, calculation of excess deaths becomes more subjective the further we get from our pre-pandemic benchmark year of 2019,” the CMI said.
“We will continue including measures of expected or excess deaths in the mortality monitor until week one of 2024.
“After that, we will still include standardised mortality rates in the monitor, so users will be able to see how mortality in each year compares, but we will stop making the comparison to 2019 such a prominent feature of our outputs.”
Cobus Daneel, chairperson of the CMI Mortality Projections Committee, said: “The third quarter of 2023 saw continuing excess mortality for the sixth quarter in a row, but at a lower level than the previous five quarters.”