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CMI says mortality remains above pre-pandemic levels

10 October 2023

The Continuous Mortality Investigation (CMI) publishes frequent UK mortality analysis through its mortality monitor. Today’s updates cover week 39 of 2023 (to 29 September) and the third quarter of 2023.

The key points of the updates are:

  • In the UK, there have been around 204,700 more registered deaths from all causes than expected from the start of the pandemic to 29 September 2023. Of these, 75,600 occurred in 2020, 56,500 in 2021, 39,400 in 2022, and 33,200 in the first three quarters of 2023.
  • The third quarter of 2023 had excess deaths but at a lower level than the previous five quarters (see chart below).

  • 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% of the total number of excess deaths in the third quarter of 2023.
  • We intend 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.

Cobus Daneel, Chair 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.”

We will continue including measures of expected or excess deaths in the mortality monitor until week 1 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.

All mortality monitor weekly updates are publicly available on the mortality monitor page.

Today’s updates are based on provisional deaths data published for England & Wales by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) on 10 October 2023, for Scotland by National Records of Scotland on 5 October 2023 and for Northern Ireland by Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency on 6 October 2023.

We define “excess” deaths as the difference between actual deaths in a week, and those that we would have expected if mortality rates had been the same as in the corresponding week of 2019. We use 2019 as the most recent “normal” year of mortality observed, as mortality in the first 12 weeks of 2019 and 2020 were similar.

The CMI publishes mortality monitors regularly:

  • Each week we publish a summary monitor, without a press release. The next is planned for week 40 of 2023 on Tuesday 17 October 2023.
  • Each quarter we publish more detail, accompanied by a press release. The next is planned for week 1 of 2024, in January 2024.