How Covid death demographics have changed

Deaths involving Covid-19 in the UK have reached their highest level since March, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

“Hospital leaders have expressed concern at strain on the NHS”, with the number of hospitalisations due to coronavirus also on the rise, reported the Financial Times.

But The Guardian said the headline figure tells “only a fraction of the story”, with scientists and academics “looking at the profiles of those who are dying to see how they compare to previous waves”.

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Age profile changing

The number of deaths involving Covid registered for the week ending 13 August was 652, the highest number seen since the end of March, according to the ONS, which also included data from its counterparts in Scotland and Northern Ireland. While this number was up from the pandemic’s low of 93 a week seen in June, it remains far below the highs of more than 9,000 weekly deaths seen in April 2020 and January 2021.

And this time, noted The Guardian, the “age profile of those dying with Covid has changed”, with under-65s accounting for around 25% of deaths, compared with 11% at the height of the second wave in January.

Kevin McConway, Emeritus professor of applied statistics at The Open University, told the newspaper the “increasing proportion of younger people among the Covid deaths clearly has a lot to do with vaccination”, as older people were prioritised earlier on in the UK’s vaccination programme.

“If vaccine coverage was equal in all age groups, experts would expect to see the same proportion of almost all deaths from Covid in elderly people,” explained The Guardian.

Waning protection

A separate study, led by Professor Tim Spector, a professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London, shows that in a reasonable “worst-case scenario”, the protection offered to these older people, as well as healthcare workers, who were vaccinated early on, could fall to below 50% by winter, reported Sky News.

The Zoe Covid Study found that protection against infection after two shots of Pfizer-BioNTech decreased from 88% at one month to 74% at five to six months, while protection from the Oxford-AstraZeneca jab fell from 77% after one month to to 67% after four to five months. Nevertheless, experts have pointed to other studies that show the two vaccinations still offer strong protection against hospitalisation and death.

Ethnicity factor

The ONS notes that patterns of Covid-19 mortality risk by ethnic group has also changed over the course of the pandemic. In the first wave in 2020, “people of Black and South Asian ethnic background had substantially higher risk of death involving Covid-19, compared with those of White British background”, it said.

But in the second wave, from September 2020 onwards, “people of Bangladeshi and Pakistani ethnic background were particularly at risk”. It adds that while black people remained at higher risk in the second wave, the relative risk compared with white people was reduced.

Pre-existing conditions

The ONS data also shows that, in England and Wales, from April to June 2021, diabetes was the most common pre-existing condition recorded on the death certificate where Covid-19 was the underlying cause of death.

This has changed since 2020, when dementia and Alzheimer’s disease were the most common pre-existing conditions across the whole year. In recent months, dementia and Alzheimer’s disease have dropped down to the seventh most common pre-existing conditions, behind other diseases such as hypertension and chronic lower respiratory problems.

The ONS notes that this change was “accompanied by a decrease in the proportion of Covid-19 deaths that were of individuals aged 65 years and over”, but that “even for people aged 65 years and over, the proportion of Covid-19 deaths with dementia and Alzheimer’s as a pre-existing condition decreased”.