What would have been your overall chances of dying in the first 19 weeks of 2021 compared with recent years? According to a measure called ‘standardised mortality’ your overall chances of dying so far in 2021 have been just 1 per cent over the average of the past ten years — that is in spite of January’s peak in Covid deaths.
We have been fed a daily diet of Covid deaths for over a year now. As Professor Gordon Wishart argues elsewhere on Coffee House, this daily bulletin has become pretty pointless now that deaths and hospitalisations are so low; a monthly total would be better.
Yet even at the height of the pandemic, the daily death figures were giving us a false impression of the death toll because they were never set in any context. We have just been fed a daily total of ‘Covid’ deaths without any analysis of who is dying — what age, other medical conditions, and so on.
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