Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

We’re at pandemic levels of death. Why is no one talking about it?

It doesn’t make sense

(Getty)

At the peak of the lockdowns, thousands were dying every week. Newspaper front pages demanded action. But in the latest week’s data, covering the week to 12 August, some 1,082 more people than would be expected in a normal year died in the UK. These so-called ‘excess deaths’ have averaged 1,000 for 15 weeks of this year. Yet unlike Covid deaths, they are met with near silence.

But it isn’t Covid that’s causing these deaths anymore. In the latest figures, published by the ONS, just 6 per cent of English and Welsh deaths had anything to do with Covid. Of nearly 10,000 weekly deaths in England, just 561 mentioned the virus on the death certificate.

Australia acts as an early warning system for the northern hemisphere because it gets its flu season six months before us. They’ve just had their worst flu season in five years

Most excess deaths now occur in private homes and previous studies have shown this is driven by the wealthy avoiding hospitals.

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