The truth about Britain’s Covid deaths

There has been a considerable hoo-hah in the press about the recent World Health Organisation report estimating Covid-related deaths internationally during the pandemic. The measurement chosen has been ‘excess deaths’ – the difference between the number who died during the pandemic and the number who, on average, died in the same place before the pandemic struck. This has enabled us to compare the British figures with excess deaths across the rest of Europe per 100,000 of the population; and it appears we’re not, after all, at the top of the death-league, but near the middle.

Though its methodology has attracted serious criticism, I was struck by the report. But what really struck me has turned out to be of no interest to any of the media responses I’ve seen, which have all been about our outcome relative to those of other European countries. We did better, for instance, than Italy, Spain and Germany but worse than France – though during the pandemic we’d thought we were doing exceptionally badly.