Covid death rates: which country fared best?
“National Covid death rates are, inevitably, political,” said Francois Balloux in The Guardian. And the longanticipated World Health Organisation figures will no doubt be scoured by those seeking evidence to back up their own positions. How did the UK compare with, say, Germany or Sweden? Whose strategies worked best? The overall death toll is “staggering”. The WHO estimates that around 15 million people worldwide died because of the pandemic in 2020-21, a figure 2.7 times higher than the officially recorded number. (This was calculated on the basis of excess deaths: the difference between expected and actual mortality.) In fact, the UK fared “unremarkably”, with 109 excess deaths per 100,000: that puts it 15th out of 28 European nations, below Germany and Italy, but above France. A few nations, such as Australia and Japan, kept excess deaths close to, or even below, zero. Eastern Europe and South America fared badly. India’s official death toll seems to have been a serious under-estimate: it was ten times lower than the WHO’s figure of 4.7 million.
It’s about time the world apologised to Sweden, said The Daily Telegraph. In the early days of the pandemic, it was “deemed almost to be a rogue state”, accused of “reckless irresponsibility” for bucking the received wisdom and refusing to impose a lockdown. But in making their decision, Swedish officials took into account the “collateral damage” of such a policy on healthcare and education. It seems they were right. Sweden had just 56 excess deaths per 100,000, one of the lowest rates in Europe. That’s only one example of where “conventional wisdom” was wrong, said Fraser Myers on Spiked. Germany, which was meant to have done everything right, suffered more excess deaths than Spain and Italy.
The report paints “a complex picture”, which doesn’t support “any single straightforward narrative”, said Francois Balloux. Sweden did well relative to most of Europe, but badly against other Nordic nations, which did impose lockdowns. On the other hand, Peru fared worst of all, “despite enforcing the harshest, longest lockdown”. It’s a useful lesson, said Matthew Syed in The Sunday Times. Our Government and its scientists were working in “a thick fog of uncertainty”. The British public mainly understood that, but you’d never guess it from the media coverage: both the anti- and pro-lockdown critics were “rabid” in their attacks on UK policy. The truth, as the WHO data shows, is that ministers did their best “in unenviable circumstances”. What strikes me most about the past two years “is the abject, often irrational nature of public discourse”.