The new data available from StatsNZ on Weekly deaths allows us to calculate Excess Mortality for any given week past week 52 of 2004. We can do this for Week 1 of 2005 by taking the average mortality for Week 1 of 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, and 2000 and comparing it to the mortality for Week 1 of 2005.
If there were more deaths on Week 1 of 2005 than that average, each 1 is an Excess Death. And we just copy that formula down the sheet as far as the data takes us.
It gives us these results: Green lines are generally the rolling 5-year average number of deaths for a given week, Blue line is the current trending total deaths per week, the red line is the Excess Mortality for the week (difference between green and blue lines) and the pink columns are the excess mortality as a percentage of the total deaths for that week.
Just a few Flourish charts that I thought were interesting. Overall is trending up, with under-30 trending down. I wonder what else I could overlay on these.
Now, before you say anything about “but that doesn’t take population change into account! NZ had massive population growth so a little piddly few extra dead don’t make a huge difference”, this is NZ’s population (quarterly, they don’t break down more than that) and the percentage increase each quarter, since 2000:
It doesn’t break the 1% mark. The under 30 group has several points where it is negative, including a fairly massive one during late 2021 – early 2022..
