CMI mortality monitor – week 42 of 2024
October 2024
This is a part re-production of a CMI Mortality Monitor as a proof on concept for producing documents in R, rendering to a HTML file and then publishing to RPubs
This update is for week 42 of 2024, ending on 18 October 2024 and published on 30 October 2024. The CMI website has details of the calculation methods and previous updates. Results are based on the date of registration of deaths. Using date of occurrence, if available, may give different results.
Note: Since 9 September 2024 death registration reforms means that the five-day period for registering a death starts on the date that the registrar receives a signed medical certificate of cause of death from the medical examiner, or relevant notification from the coroner. Previously, deaths should legally have been registered within five days of the death occurring or the date on which a body was found (including weekends and bank holidays), unless a coroner was involved. This change may have affected registration delays since 9 September and, therefore, the statistics covering recent weeks contained in this monitor should be treated with care.
Chart 1: Weekly standardised mortality rates in England & Wales for 2011-2019 (grey bars) and 2022-2024 (lines)
Chart 2 shows cumulative standardised mortality rates relative to the ten-year average for 2014-2023, as a proportion of the full year’s mortality for the 2014-2023 average. While we compare to a ten-year average, this is not intended as a measure of likely or ‘normal’ deaths for 2024.
Under this measure, cumulative standardised mortality to week 42 of 2024 is 3.8% below the ten-year average.
Chart 2: Cumulative standardised mortality rate compared to the 2014-2023 average
Chart 3 shows the cumulative annual standardised mortality improvement for 2024 and the previous ten years. The cumulative improvement for year N is the reduction in cumulative mortality from year N–1 to year N, as a proportion of full-year mortality for year N–1.
The cumulative mortality improvement to week 42 of 2024 (relative to 2023) is +3.5%.