During the year from the week ending 5 June 2022 to the week ending 4 June 2023, the United Kingdom recorded 1,059 excess deaths per million people. The strangest thing about this is that excess deaths in the UK in 2023 are higher than excess deaths in the same period in 2020-21 in 13 of the 27 EU countries!
If the peoples of Austria, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands and Sweden were so worried about the probability of dying that they agreed to shut down, they voluntarily destroyed the their economies and let their children go to school in 2020-21 (well, Sweden didn’t, but the rest did), why don’t we feel the need to do the same now? We have more excess deaths now than we did then.
If YouGov ran a poll tomorrow asking whether or not we should, right now, go back into lockdown, how many thumbs up would it get? Very few, I should expect. But if UK citizens don’t think it’s a good idea now, why did the Germans, Finns or Greeks think it was a good idea in 2020 and 2021? Could it be that they were manipulated? That they didn’t give them the whole picture? What were ‘held’?
Let’s try to put some perspective on this number. We can think of 1,059 excess deaths per 1,000,000 population in several ways. As a straight percentage, let’s round it to 0.1%. This means that we expect 0.1% of the population to die in addition to the number of people we might normally expect to die in a year. Or, if you prefer, one extra person in every 1,000 will die a year.
In the UK, about one person in 100 dies each year, that’s 1% of the population. But if we are experiencing excess deaths at the 0.1% level, we can expect about 1.1% of the population to die this year. Let’s take the example of a large or small town of 100,000 inhabitants. In a normal year, we expect 1,000 deaths. With the highest level of excess deaths this year, funeral directors would expect to see 1,100 deaths. This is all very simple.
In case you forgot, the period from April 5, 2020 to April 4, 2021 included the two major spikes in fatalities in spring 2020 and winter 2020-21. It is also the period that ended before the vaccine rollout was somehow completed. While around 50% of the UK population had received a dose of the vaccine by then, in the EU the figure was only 20%. This period was very much the year we would have expected to see a peak in “all-cause” pandemic excess deaths in the UK and across Europe with very little improvement from previous vaccines or infections.
Figure 1 shows excess deaths from all causes in the EU for the period 4 April 2020 to 5 April 2021. I have overlaid the Our world in data graph with a thick red line representing UK excess deaths from all causes from 5 June 2022 to 4 June 2023. You can see that UK deaths in 2022-2023 would have been in the “middle table” among EU countries in 2020-21.
What to make of this? It asks some questions that the Hallett inquiry should surely ask. Such as: “If there are more deaths per head of population in the UK now than in half the EU in 2020-21, were Europeans crazy for locking up then, or are we crazy for not locking up now?” Or: “Given that, with the honorable exception of Sweden, all these countries followed broadly the same set of policies, the Bulgarians with about 3,500 excess deaths per million and Denmark with excess deaths below of the average, do you both feel that confinement was a valuable tool?” If the lockdown was so effective, why were the deaths in Bulgaria so high? If the pandemic was so deadly, why were they so low in Denmark?
But the fun doesn’t end there. Figure 2 shows the UK and 13 EU countries with excess deaths from all causes in the 12 months to April 2023 (the latest date for which figures were available for all countries) greater than 750 per million. In 2020-21, this level of excess deaths would have put you in the middle of the EU excess deaths league table. Clearly, in 2020-21 it was considered essential to close populations with these modest levels of overkill (or indeed lower).
In Figure 2, excess deaths from all causes for the 12 months to 4 April 2021 are shown by the blue bar and for the 12 months to 26 March 2023 by the orange bar. In eight of the countries (Germany, Finland, Austria, Latvia, Greece, Estonia, the Netherlands and Ireland), the excess deaths in 2022-23 have been greater than in 2020-21. In Germany, for example, the excess deaths in 2022-23 have been four times higher than in 2020/21. Finland had fewer deaths than normal in 2020-21, while they now have an excess of deaths that would have placed them in the top half of the EU death league in 2020-21. Ireland and Greece have almost twice the level of excess deaths in 2022-23 than in 2020-21.
Just for fun, step into the shoes of the German, Austrian or Irish equivalent of Lady Hallett for a moment. How would you justify, with a straight face, your countrymen spending a few hundred million euros investigating the terrible events of the “once in a century” 2020-21 pandemic, when death supposedly gripped the earth, resulting in to much lower excess deaths? what are they now
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