Relative age-standardised mortality
Analysis from the Office for National Statistics compares European nations.
In my co-written book Covid by Numbers, a graph shows relative age-standardised mortality. The graph in the book has a production error, where the UK lines do not have correct alignment. The original version, made in R, looks like:
What are relative age-standardised mortality rates? To calculate age-standardised mortality, we need to find mortality rates within age groups. Next, analysts calculate the weighted average of these age-specific rates. The weights come from a standard population, here: the 2013 European Standard population. This index is then
The Office for National Statistics updated their analysis. Now, we can update this graph. In the original version, I uploaded a spreadsheet containing the mortality statistics. This time, I want to draw straight from the online file. That helps make the code more reproducible.
To achieve that goal, I use the curl package:
temp <- tempfile()
temp <- curl_download(url = ons_rasmr_url, destfile = temp,
quiet = TRUE, mode = "wb")
ons_rasmr_tbl <- read_excel(temp,
sheet = ons_rasmr_sheet,
range = ons_rasmr_range)