Some seriously impressive charting on your Scotland Coronavirus Tracker page. Well done.
I’ve been tracking the excess deaths figures as to me that is one of the best measures of the severity of the pandemic, e.g. will the excess deaths graph eventually fall significantly below the 5 year average implying that many of the deaths would have occured anyway?
I’m puzzled though with your 2020 coronavirus deaths graph (the red line in your ‘deaths compared with previous years’ graph) as the figures don’t seem to tally with those on the NRS site. However, when I look at your underlying spreadsheet (tab name ‘regional excess deaths’) the figures do agree with the NRS site, e.g. totals of 749, 600 and 400 for the three most recent weeks. Your graph plots 659, 525 and 415 for the same three weeks. Or am I looking at the wrong figures somehow?
Also, I think I know what the issue is! The red line is just representing the number of deaths from Coronavirus each week (the figures of 659, 525, and 415). The figures of 749, 600, and 400 are the figures for the total number of excess deaths each week. They’re a bit different as not all excess deaths will be from the virus. A similar chart can be seen in the NRS report as ‘figure 5’.
2 Responses
Hello John
Some seriously impressive charting on your Scotland Coronavirus Tracker page. Well done.
I’ve been tracking the excess deaths figures as to me that is one of the best measures of the severity of the pandemic, e.g. will the excess deaths graph eventually fall significantly below the 5 year average implying that many of the deaths would have occured anyway?
I’m puzzled though with your 2020 coronavirus deaths graph (the red line in your ‘deaths compared with previous years’ graph) as the figures don’t seem to tally with those on the NRS site. However, when I look at your underlying spreadsheet (tab name ‘regional excess deaths’) the figures do agree with the NRS site, e.g. totals of 749, 600 and 400 for the three most recent weeks. Your graph plots 659, 525 and 415 for the same three weeks. Or am I looking at the wrong figures somehow?
Hi,
Thank you! 🙂
Also, I think I know what the issue is! The red line is just representing the number of deaths from Coronavirus each week (the figures of 659, 525, and 415). The figures of 749, 600, and 400 are the figures for the total number of excess deaths each week. They’re a bit different as not all excess deaths will be from the virus. A similar chart can be seen in the NRS report as ‘figure 5’.
Hope that helps!