Counting the dead

One thing we’ve become horribly familiar with in recent weeks, said The Guardian, is death statistics. “Europe’s fatalities pass 100,000,” shouts one headline. “Britain passes 20,000 deaths,” says another. But how much store can we set by them? As each country counts Covid deaths in a different way, they’re clearly a very flawed measure for comparing how each is faring in the crisis. Belgium, for example, has the unenviable distinction of having the most deaths per capita in Europe, but that’s partly because it includes suspected Covid-19 deaths in care homes, which account for around half of the total.

In Britain, by contrast, official figures didn’t include care homes until this week, said Tom Whipple in The Times. “And since overall fatalities in care homes tripled between the end of March and mid-April – passing 7,000 a week – that puts a different complexion on the matter.” Indeed, even as the hospital death rate from the virus is declining, care-home deaths in Britain may be escalating and could soon overtake the weekly hospital number. It’s worth looking at the data for the week ending 17 April, said the FT. That was a week in which the death toll in

England and Wales, 22,351, was twice the average (10,497) for the comparable week in the years 2015-19. And in that week, a third of all recorded deaths were in care homes. This suggests that the crisis here is a lot more severe than the official figures indicate.

That’s why we should look at the figures for “excess mortality” – the gap between the total number of people dying from any cause in a given place and time and the historical average – rather than rely on official Covid-19 data, said The Economist. When we do, alas, it looks as though far more have died from the virus than we thought. “Excess” deaths in Italy between 1 March and

4 April, for example, were double the Covid-19 tally, no doubt reflecting the fact that those dying at home in Italy don’t tend to be recorded in the official figures. But however you count death rates, said Mark Brolin in The Daily Telegraph, we know the factors that give countries a high one. High population density and containing an international hub are two – which is why New York, London and Brussels have been so badly hit. Multigenerational mixing – as in Italy and Spain – is another. The most telling case against Sweden’s refusal to take decisive lockdown action is not its death toll per se, it is the striking number of deaths for a country in which none of these key factors apply.