Who Really Died Last Summer?

The cold is the real villain, not the sun.

The UK Health Security Agency, UKHSA, have announced there were an estimated 1,504 heat-associated deaths in England last summer, apparently lower than they had originally forecast.

What are “heat-associated deaths”, you might well ask. I doubt whether any death certificates had heat recorded as the cause of death! How can they be so certain that the number is 1,504, and not 1,503 or 1,505?

Strangely, the UKHSA has only been publishing these statistics since 2024. People might therefore reasonably presume that this is just another scare story to sell Net Zero. After all, they never publish excess death statistics for spring and autumn, when the death rate is much higher.

Weekly data shows a steady decline in deaths throughout the summer. The table below is compiled from ONS weekly registration of deaths data (bear in mind that registration is around a week after the date of death). As weekly registrations are affected by bank holidays, I have calculated averages per working day i.e., excluding bank holidays: