An improved measure of deaths due to COVID-19 in England and Wales

‘How many deaths in England and Wales are due to COVID-19?’ An ‘excess deaths’ measure of COVID deaths is preferable, but a limitation of the current metric (a comparison to a 5 year average for the same week), is that it attributes all the variation in mortality to COVID-19. This likely means the metric is overstated because there are other drivers of mortality. We account for other drivers including the lockdown using novel Poisson models for deaths (in totality; by age category; for males; and females). Novel COVID identifier variables (a variation on a dummy variable) are used to estimate weekly deviations in COVID deaths about the mean weekly estimate. For 17 or 24 April 2020 - 8 May 2020, we predict that total weekly COVID deaths are considerably below the 5 year average excess deaths – on average per week, 4670 or 4727 deaths lower (54% or 63% lower, respectively).