Kilkenny Deaths : Rip.ie and CSO Mortality Rates Compared
Understanding and bridging the gap to get 'real time' data to effect immediate change.
In October 2022, after a few months of receiving an increasing amount of emails of death notices for ‘Kilkenny’ from rip.ie I perceived that there was a marked increase in dying in my county.
A quick comparison of death notices, excluding duplications, for Q3: 2019 and 2022 showed an increase from 179 to 238 deaths, 59 (33%).
I resolved to check this out using rip.ie data and if there was a major increase to contact local politicians, media etc to get them to ask questions and seek answers as to what was happening.
Why not wait for the Central Statistics Office to release official figures ?
Rip.ie is real time mortality data while the CSO statistics are released up to 5 months in arrears ie Q4 2022 death figures are due for release on 26/5/23.
I considered the scale of the dying a clear and present danger to people and to wait over 7 months for October 2022 figures to appear in CSO statistics bordering on the criminal.
CSO mortality figures are Ireland’s official death statistics and are analysed by county of death. The CSO accepts the validity of rip.ie data as representative of Irish deaths. This is from a CSO study :
While this is fine for overall mortality there is a major difficulty in reconciling rip.ie data and CSO figures for individual counties mainly due to duplicated notices, foreign death notices, notices for people from a county but dying elsewhere and a possible time lag as there are 3 months allowed before a death has to be registered.
In their comparison the CSO achieved this by ‘cleansing’ the data to get the 99% correlation.
I believed that for my research to have any validity, I needed to have the minimum amount of ‘cleansing’ of the data so that anyone willing to do so could check my data.
The purpose of my research was NOT to compile an exact list of people who died in Kilkenny that would agree with the CSO but to extract self selecting pure unbiased comparable data to establish if there were observable patterns which would back up my perception of a major increase in mortality in Kilkenny.
The self selection would come from searching rip.ie by ‘Kilkenny’ and accepting the results.
Why Kilkenny ?
Well that’s where I have lived all my life, so as far as I was concerned the selection of ‘Kilkenny’ was objective because of this.
The county chose me, making the data self selecting.
If I wasn’t analysing Kilkenny, then questions would be asked.
I decided to compile the deaths for each month for 2018 to 2022 with the only adjustment to the search results being the removal of duplications.
Yes, that would leave in foreign deaths and entries where people from Kilkenny died in other counties but I believed that these would happen every year and that for comparison purposes the effect would be negligible.
With the following data, I believe that I was shown to be correct and that my real time mortality data comparison from rip.ie stands up as safe and unbiased.
TABLE 1: Comparison of Kilkenny Deaths per CSO and RIP.ie.
This compares CSO and rip.ie deaths for Kilkenny for the years 2018 to 2021. While the unadjusted rip.ie deaths are obviously higher than the CSO figures the differential is within a very small spread for the 4 years ie. 74% to 77%.
The above research by Alan McSweeney ‘Analysis of Irish Mortality using Public Data Sources 2014-2020’ also backs up my calculation for Kilkenny showing reconciled CSO figures at 74% of rip.ie figures for Ireland even before duplications are removed.
TABLE 2: Calculation of Q1-Q3 2022 Differential :
On comparing the 2022 data for Q1 to Q3 the differential is 74%.
Three of the five successive periods compared come up with a 74% differential with the other two higher and the widest spread is only 3 percentage points.
This gives credibility to my Overall Deaths data for Kilkenny published previously because it shows a relatively constant relationship between CSO and rip.ie figures which can be utilised for comparative purposes.
TABLE 3: Projection of Q4 CSO figures (due out 26/5/23) :
There were 313 deaths in rip.ie for Q4 2022, in 2019 the figure was 212 !
232 deaths are projected for CSO Q4 2022 based on a 74% differential, which is the minimum achieved over the last 5 years.
TABLE 4: Percentage increase in deaths in 2022 per CSO and rip.ie statistics.
As you can see from the above table there is a strong correlation between my published rip.ie data and actual and projected CSO statistics.
I originally estimated a 2022 increase on 2019 of 30% for 4 months July to Oct 22 in November 22 in sounding the alarm.
That will be seven months ahead of the CSO confirming a major increase in mortality for Kilkenny.
It would take a fall in the correlation between CSO and rip.ie figures to 62% for Q4 2022 to bring the 2022 CSO increase in mortality on 2019 below 20%.
To put that CSO figure in perspective:
2019 was down 2% on 2018 :
2020 (Pandemic Year) was only up 2% on 2019 :
2021 was up 6% on 2020
….and 2022 is going to be 20%+ up on 2019 !!!!
On 26/5/23, if my projections for 2022 Q4 are correct, the overall increase in deaths for Kilkenny per CSO will be confirmed at around 25% for 2022 compared to 2019 and at around 23% for 2022 compared to 2020 which was the year of the ‘Great Pandemic’.
Using rip.ie mortality figures is never going to be an exact science but it does allow us to see increases and trends in real time and to take timely action if needed.
CSO mortality statistics will tell us what happened, acting on rip.ie statistics just might prevent some of it happening.
At what stage can we all agree there has been a significant increase in dying in Kilkenny so we can move on and get answers?
The first 4 months of 2023 are up 26% on 2019.
Let’s act in ‘real time’……