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It is a major topic of interest during the covid pandemic to analyse excess mortality. And it is particularly helpful to look at weekly death counts as the resulting year-year comparisons of weekly data provide rich information about the variability of deaths rates across seasons and years.

The USA's CDC provide such data from at least 2015 to the end of 2020 and this make identifying excess mortality related to covid a breeze. See this analysis, for example:

USA weekly deaths 2015-2020 in different age groups

But how many other countries provide weekly mortality stats?

Note the CDC provide the stats with several levels of detail (in the case above by age group). But weekly totals even without the extra breakdowns would be useful. The UK's ONS recently released some weekly stats for 2020 but this didn't seem to have the equivalent weekly totals for previous years when I investigated the equivalent files.

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Our World in Data is compiling excess-death statistics across multiple countries with various age-groups.

https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid

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You can mix and match and then download the datasets. Not all countries are represented. Not all age-groups will match between countries, because of how individual countries report their statistics.

If you need a specific country, you can look through their "sources" list.

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Deaths registered weekly in England and Wales, provisional

About this dataset

Provisional counts of the number of deaths registered in England and Wales, by age, sex, and region, in the latest weeks for which data are available. Includes the most up-to-date figures available for deaths involving the coronavirus (COVID-19).


The Human Mortality Database

The Human Mortality Database (HMD) was created to provide detailed mortality and population data to researchers, students, journalists, policy analysts, and others interested in the history of human longevity. The project began as an outgrowth of earlier projects in the Department of Demography at the University of California, Berkeley, USA, and at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany (see history). It is the work of two teams of researchers in the USA and Germany (see research teams), with the help of financial backers and scientific collaborators from around the world (see acknowledgments). The Center on the Economics and Development of Aging (CEDA) French Institute for Demographic Studies (INED) has also supported the further development of the database in recent years.

Try here: To explore this data with online STMF visualization toolkit.


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  • My inability to find this dataset was what originally triggered the question. The obvious links on the ONS site give the latest year weekly but not the weekly versions of previous years. Could be my inability to search properly or could be the incomprehensible search facility on the ONS site!
    – matt_black
    Jan 25, 2021 at 11:45

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