Bad weather or flu not responsible for 12 percent rise in fatalities in Britain

There has been a 12 percent hike in the number of deaths in Britain, and it's not due to bad weather or flu.

Reportedly, more than 10,000 extra people have died in the first few weeks of 2018 than is usual. There were about 93,990 deaths in England and Wales in the first seven weeks of 2018 compared to a average of 83,615 over the same weeks in the previous five years.

This unexpected rise in the number of deaths has prompted researchers at Oxford University and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine to call for an investigation, as health officials have so far not given any possible causes for these deaths.

Health officials say it's unlikely a single factor is the root cause for these deaths. They fear inefficiencies in the health and social care system could be a contributing factor.

This report comes just months after charity organisation Age UK revealed in a report that the social care system in England was at risk of imminent collapse unless necessary steps were taken to address the crisis.

Meanwhile, an editorial in the British Medical Journal suggests that the number of deaths could have been higher if hospital beds had not been made available. "It’s possible that the emergency ending of operations and opening up the beds has averted something even worse," Danny Dorling, professor of geography at Oxford, was quoted as saying by Daily Mail

"We’ve had a very big increase in the number of deaths and it’s not because of the flu. We had another similar increase in 2015 as well. These two things are unprecedented in the post-war period so the concentration of deaths looks to be when the whole health and social care system is doing particularly badly, then those who are particularly frail are more likely to die.

"The underlying thing is that we have had this incredible slowdown in health improvements since 2010, but really things are getting worse."