It was only two weeks ago that I wrote about the official cover up of excess deaths in winter. It did not take long for my suspicions to be confirmed.
Last week the Telegraph reported:
Three times more people die during cold snaps than when the weather is very hot, official data show.
Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that from 1988 to 2025, about 42,000 people died on the hottest days. On the coldest days almost 150,000 died, in the same period.
However, data suggest the difference between the numbers of deaths because of cold and heat is shrinking.
The average annual death toll from cold in the 1990s was four times that of heat. But in the years 2015-2025, the difference shrank to 1.5-fold.
This trend is being driven by more frequent and persistent periods of very hot weather, which have resulted in heat-related deaths peaking in the summer of 2022, when temperatures in the UK reached 40°C for the first time on record.
There were an estimated 4,652 heat-related deaths in England and Wales in 2022, the highest figure for any year on record.
Three of the five highest years were in the past 10: 2025 (2,805 deaths) and 2018 (2,617), along with 2022.
All figures are based on modelled estimates of mortality and are not actual counts of deaths directly caused by extreme weather.
Commenting on the findings, James Tucker of the ONS said: “As our climate changes, including more frequent and prolonged periods of very hot weather, it is important to understand how both heat and cold affect mortality over time.
“Our results show that the gap between heat and cold-related deaths has narrowed in recent years as the proportion of heat-related deaths has increased.”
Full story here.
The number of heat-related deaths itself is absurdly meaningless – 42,000 sounds a lot, but over 38 years it is barely a thousand a year. Compared to annual deaths of over 600,000, that is microscopically tiny. These deaths are supposedly excess deaths over and above what might have been expected.
