Excess pneumonia and influenza death as herald wave of COVID-19 in England and Wales, United Kingdom

Abstract

We read with interest Gosce et al's modelling on COVID-19 in London, United Kingdom (UK),1Gosce L. Phillips A. Spinola P. Gupta R.K. Abubakar I Modelling SARS-COV2 Spread in London: approaches to Lift the Lockdown.J Infect. 2020; Abstract Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (2) Google Scholar concerning approaches to lift the lockdown. Their work utilized notified cases, deaths, contacts, and mobility data. The authors pointed out “the recent observed increase in all-cause mortality during lockdown, which is in part due to individuals dying from other causes warrants investigation.” In this work, we analyse the impact of COVID-19 on all-cause mortality and pneumonia and influenza (PI 383: 303-305https://doi.org/10.1056/nejmp2016822Crossref Google Scholar,3Lu F.S. Nguyen A.T. Link N.B. Lipsitch M. Santillana M Estimating the early outbreak cumulative incidence of COVID-19 in the United States: three complementary approaches.medRxiv. 2020; https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.18.20070821Crossref Google Scholar. All-cause deaths were also used to reconstruct the course of the pandemic, often through implementing the well-known Serfling's method4Serfung R.E. Sherman I.L. Houseworth W.J Excess pneumonia-influenza mortality by age and sex in three major influenza a2 epidemics, United States, 1957-58, 1960 and 1963.Am J Epidemiol. 1967; 86: 433-441https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.aje.a120753Crossref PubMed Scopus (93) Google Scholar. Weinberger et al. (2020) found that the all-cause deaths are 28% higher than the reported number of COVID-19 deaths from March 1 to May 30, 2020, in the United States5Weinberger D.M. Chen J. Cohen T. Crawford F.W. Mostashari F. Olson D. Pitzer V.E. Reich N.G. Russi M. Simonsen L. Watkins A Estimation of excess deaths associated with the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, March to May 2020.JAMA Intern Med. 2020; (Jul 1)Crossref PubMed Scopus (5) Google Scholar. For comparison, we found that the excess all-cause mortality is 23.4% higher than the reported number of COVID-19 deaths over the same period in the United Kingdom.