"Rod Speed" wrote in message
...

Can anyone think of a logical reason, which doesn't involve
alcohol-related accidents, people who are terminally ill holding out
until their next birthday, depression/suicide "I'm a year older than I
was" etc? Something which is "blindingly obvious" even to a ten-year-old
at school?

He's right. The reason is that the day of the year that people are born
on isnt evenly distributed over the year, so it is considerably more
likely
that you will die on the same day of the year for that reason.

I can accept that the dates when people are born are not uniformly
distributed throughout the year. They will be skewed partly by working
forwards 9 months from key dates (eg Christmas period, summer holidays,
birthdays of parents) when it is *maybe* more likely that parents had sex.
And maybe there are more births in the autumn to correspond with sex in the
winter months when people have "nothing better to do". There may even be a
tendency for more babies to be born on weekdays when there are more
maternity staff around, if babies are induced or born by caesarian. And
maybe, just maybe, there will be more neonatal deaths in the winter, so
those people who survive that will be slightly skewed towards non-winter
births. I can imagine seasonal neonatal deaths are less of an issue now than
they used to be before medical science improved.

There will be more deaths in colder, winter months - or in excessively hot
times. Of course Covid will have completely messed with those statistics for
the past 18 months and maybe smoothed out any normal troughs. But that is
(hopefully) an exceptional situation. I'm not actually sure what proportion
the Covid deaths have been of the total number deaths ("normal" plus Covid).

But will there necessarily be any correlation between these two events.
Because there are more babies born during a certain time of year, will there
necessarily be more deaths at that *same* time of year?