British statisticians chart the trajectory of extra deaths in European countries
Three years after news broke about the existence of a deadly virus in Wuhan, the coronavirus is the cause of the deaths of 6,673 of the planet’s residents, according to researchers at the Pandemic Monitoring Center at Johns Hopkins University. , in Baltimore, USA.
In recent weeks, lockdown policies have failed in China, whose government faces an inevitable wave of infections. And in European countries, cases and deaths have increased, for reasons that are not clear, although the most compelling explanation may be the deterioration in health due to incarceration, the deficiencies of overwhelmed health services and the rise in poverty.
Due to the drastic reduction in testing, the available data is limited. The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control no longer publishes the daily graph of the evolution of the pandemic. Their data is limited due to the lack of records in several countries. But the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) has published a comparative analysis of the effect of the virus in 28 European countries.
They have taken as a benchmark the excess of all-cause deaths in those countries between the week ending January 3, 2020 and the week ending July 1, 2022. The deductible is calculated by comparing the number of deaths in a given period with the average of recorded deaths during the five years from 2015 to 2019, before the pandemic.
The result is not rosy for the UK. The relative increase in mortality between the two periods compared was 3.1%. As happened in most countries analyzed, this increase over two and a half years is less than that of the intense period of the pandemic, between January 2020 and July 2021, when the percentage increase in deaths was 5.8%.
Of the 28 European countries analysed, the United Kingdom had the 15th highest relative excess mortality. The long-term ONS measure paints a better picture for France, at 1.3%, and Spain, at 1.8%, which had the highest relative excess deaths in 2020. The two countries are ranked tenth and eleventh respectively in the ranking. The Scandinavian countries register a long-term decline in mortality.
Veena Raleigh, a member of the King’s Fund, a leading health studies group, believes these differences can be attributed to the pressures that health structures in each country had to work with as well as more permanent public health factors. . Before the pandemic, life expectancy for men and women in the UK was already lower than in Spain.
The research of the British statisticians confirms the existence of a similar curve in the European countries of the evolution of the curve. In Bulgaria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Hungary, Latvia and to a lesser extent Croatia and Poland, the relative number of excess deaths peaked after April 2021, while in countries with sharp peaks at the start of the pandemic, the rates are drastically lowered.
One of the conclusions of the various published calculations is the difficulty of accurately measuring causes of death. Johns Hopkins University, which places Peru as the country with the most covid deaths per 100,000 inhabitants. The list of twenty countries, updated Thursday morning, places China as the country with the lowest relative mortality, at 1.8 per 100,000.
Sweden records a relative mortality rate for the period between January 2020 and July 2022 of -4%. They are ahead of other Scandinavian countries in this drop in mortality, but Emma Frans, a researcher at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, recalled in “The Conversation” that, along with errors in the first response, the policy of reducing primary schools is now celebrated as a great success.
Source: La Verdad
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