Assuming this is counting people not crashes an average of 40 jumping to 80 doesn’t appear too shocking as I would think that meant one or so more crashes than normal. Unless it’s a bunch of really small planes.
The striking part is that it's so much higher while we're 7 weeks into the year. The other years include all 52 weeks. Also 40 is close to the maximum for previous years on the chart, not the average, which I'd estimate around 25.
Unfortunately, this graph doesn’t consider that one incident can skew the data strongly because large incidents don’t happen yearly. (And the last incident of this magnitude was This means you can’t infer a trend from this graph alone.
If you include dates back to the 1990s, things look a lot worse then than now.
That one bad incident (I assume you mean the helicoptor crash) had 67 fatalities. If you remove it, you still get 19 across 4 accidents, which is still way worse than previous years