Experts have called on the Government to explain why there were more than 10,000 “additional deaths” in England and Wales in the first few weeks of 2018. An editorial published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) showed that during the first seven weeks of the year, there were 93,990 deaths. But in the same period over the previous five years an average of 83,615 people died.
The authors from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and University of Oxford explained, “This rise of 12.4 per cent, or 10,375 additional deaths, was not due to the ageing of the population.” The data, collected weekly by the Office of National Statistics also excludes that these deaths were all caused by this year’s exceptionally high flu levels.
The authors said that the deaths, the equivalent of an extra person every seven minutes in the first 49 days of 2018, are the result of sustained underfunding and should be taken more seriously by the Government.
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