by Liam Cook 20th Jan 2021

With the UK government claiming 50% of the over 80s have now been vaccinated, shouldn't we be seeing a drop in the "registered with covid" deaths, especially in that age group?

As the average age of death "with covid" is 82 years old, this is the group that makes up the most numbers of the "with covid" deaths.

I had a look myself at ONS from the most recently reported week, 8th Jan 21 back to a couple weeks before the vaccines began roll out.

In the most recent week, and you will see the number of over 80s dying "with covid" doubled....and there has been no drop.

Now considering roughly 25-35% of the over 80s by that point would have received their vaccines, this is not a good indicator of the vaccines efficacy if more in that age range are now dying with covid than before the vaccines.

Of course other factors could, and will be blamed, such as it being colder etc etc, but even so with a large chunk of that group having been vaccinated already, we shouldn't be seeing a doubling of deaths.

These are the figures for the number of over 80s dying "registered with covid" per the UK government:

8th Jan 2021: 3635

1st Jan 2021: 1960

25th Dec 2020: 1827

18th Dec 2020: 1889

11th Dec 2020: 1673

4th Dec 2020: 1706

27th Nov 2020: 1864

20th Nov 2020: 1617