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.”
Veena Raleigh, a senior fellow at the health think tank the King’s Fund, told
The BMJ that there had been large numbers of deaths related to flu and covid-19 in December 2022 and January this year, which was influencing the figures.
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The 2023 figures to date do not compare well with 2019.
Mortality to date is about 5.5% higher than it was for the same period in 2019,” she said.
With 2023 to date, we haven’t had the bounce back that we might have expected once the worst of the pandemic was over.
In the first three quarters of 2023 the mortality rate was higher than in many years in the pre-pandemic decade. If we have a good coming winter things could get back to 2019 levels relatively quickly, but it’s unpredictable.