It's a beautiful Wednesday evening on this island. When the sun pours down on days like this, and the birds are signing, and the roads are quiet, you can close your eyes and briefly forget about the very bad thing happening in this country and so many other countries right now. It's important to tune out the relentless Covid-19 coverage from time to time because the coronavirus isn't going away anytime soon.
If you want an insight into the hardship happening around the country, simply visit RIP.ie. The website was already a massively hub of Irish digital life before the coronavirus. In an era where funerals are all but illegal, the website provides an essential public service. Its use had become so widespread that RIP.ie is the closest thing we have to a public death registry.
RIP.ie has never been busier. In an age of pandemic, activity on that website can tell a very interesting, and tragic, story. Over the past few weeks, UCC economist Seamus Coffey has been studying the average number of death notices over a seven day period on RIP.ie and comparing them with past years. The data sadly points to a large rise in deaths over the past four weeks.
Coffey first posted this date on April 5. Here you can see a noticeable rise in death notices.
This shows a moving average of notices posted per day to https://t.co/O5V34UTYV7 for the past four weeks.
Up to late March, the average was just over 90 per day. In the past ten days it has risen consistently. As of Sat 4th, the average is 20 notices per day higher, and rising. pic.twitter.com/ywVUjuHd14— Seamus Coffey (@seamuscoffey) April 5, 2020
Yesterday Coffey updated the data to show a plateau over the Easter weekend, though the number is still well up on other recent years.
As noted here previously, the daily average of postings to https://t.co/O5V34UTYV7 was rising rapidly up to last Wednesday. Over the Easter weekend this increase stopped though obviously the level remains elevated. pic.twitter.com/OuWZgSZTHq
— Seamus Coffey (@seamuscoffey) April 14, 2020
In national terms, for the first half of April there will be c.500 additional postings to https://t.co/O5V34UTYV7 than would typically be expected.
If the current elevated level persists it will become more significant, and also in the context of a c.30,000 annual figure.
/end— Seamus Coffey (@seamuscoffey) April 14, 2020
Here's how the first four months of 2020 compare with every year in the last decade.
Didn't think a chart of notices posted to https://t.co/O5V34UTYV7 would get an update so frequently.
As of Apr 8, the 7-day average of notices is higher than any time during Nov-Apr from 2013-20, and rising by c.5 per day (each day is c.35 higher than the same day last week). pic.twitter.com/0Fx7H5UtjS— Seamus Coffey (@seamuscoffey) April 9, 2020
It's pretty depressing reading, and tells a story about the challenges that a pandemic poses to a public health system. There have been 444 confirmed deaths from coronavirus as of this evening, but the pandemic puts an obvious strain on the health system that inevitably causes other deaths. Coffey has given us fascinating data that tells the very sad story of our time.
