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UK Pandemic
An overview of the findings from the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK
From the opening days of 2020 the world experienced the first major pandemic in a little over 100 years. Published figures in the UK do thankfully emphatically suggest that it’s direct effect on people from the beginning of 2022 was much reduced in terms of illness requiring hospitalisation, intensive care and even the ultimate cost of death.
In the light of the official counts of people tested, cases reported, hospitalisation, admission to intensive care and ultimately death, it is now clearly viable to review the all-cause mortality outcomes for people in the UK, but particularly in England & Wales, in much more detail throughout these four years.
Whilst the data available in the UK does not give any indication of the origin of the virus either by location or by time, it is worth contemplating the first prima facie declaration of the presence of the new virus in China, in particular in Wuhan, capital of Hubei province, and especially the very first publicly identified instances just a few short miles from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, at which institute almost all of the worlds Bat Coronavirus research is undertaken.
I would strongly recommend the reader acquire and carefully read:
· “Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19”, written by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley, November 2021. Fourth Estate.
· “What Really Happened In Wuhan: A Virus Like No Other, Countless Infections, Millions of Deaths”, written by Sharri Markson, September 2021. HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty Ltd.
Both worth a read with an open mind, though emphatically and repeatedly qualified by the authors as a theory and still without proof either way, which, given the general lack of cooperation from multiple sources, is unlikely to be resolved in the next few years. So they are not the usual conspiracy nonsense and equally not the “accept whatever you are told by those in power and authority” nonsense either. These being the two currents in general public discussion seeming to draw the greatest and loudest collections of polarised adherents in the last few decades!
As to the outcomes in the UK, the obvious severity of the pandemic was only ever fully assessable from the ultimate of all-cause excess mortality. This was emphasised over and over again in the briefings throughout 2020.
It is these metrics that are the only meaningful start point from which to make any rational assessment of the course of the pandemic in the UK (in reality England & Wales for our purposes) and it’s consequences.
A note on “excess” mortality is worth making here, namely that “excess” mortality means the difference between the count of actual (registered) deaths and “expected” deaths, where actual is documented in the form of the official count (in this case, weekly deaths collated by the ONS from the registration of deaths) and “expected” is usually published by the ONS in the form of an average (mean) of the previous five years for the equivalent weeks of those five years.
It is interesting to note that in 2024 the ONS has actually developed and published a new method for calculating “expected” deaths with some praise offered by various statistical experts. However it is not easy to reproduce and analyse it’s findings as the data at the necessary level of detail is not publicly available and the method is thus somewhat opaque.
It should be noted the consequences of this new method is analysed at the end of this volume and interestingly it produces a very notable uplift in “expected” deaths from the spring of 2023 onwards. This has the effect of reporting much reduced “excess” deaths from that time. Notably the ONS has now adopted this new method and the effect is clearly present also in data for 2024 to-date as well.
Since none of this considers the cause of those deaths, the results of this standard approach produces the “all-cause excess mortality”.
It is this that offers the first major focus in the well documented data for the UK and clearly tells us that, for the size of the population the effective outcome during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic is significantly less than half, possibly less than a third, the “excess” mortality experienced during the Spanish flu of 1918-1919.
The very important caveats to this finding are that this can only be deduced in practice from the relative change in the number or rate of annual deaths for females, in that during the earlier pandemic so many young men were fighting and dying in the final year of The Great War.
In addition it is very important to understand two other caveats. Firstly that the general state of the health of people a century earlier was not as robust as today. Some of this is at least accommodated for by reference to comparative counts and rates of deaths in preceding and following years that century earlier. Secondly there was no policy of so-called “lockdown” implemented during the time of the Spanish flu, nor in fact quite as much public and media focus, due to the need to maintain the war effort.
These caveats thus all make the results of any analysis useful but not definitive as to detailed causes, effects and consequences of either the virus itself, health interventions and chosen actions taken by most governments in response to the presence of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The next major finding that has emerged from the data is that, inevitably, during the very first weeks of the wave of infections, hospitalisations and deaths from the end of March 2020 to the end of May 2020, the testing capacity was so low that a very large number of cases and subsequent deaths are simply unrecorded as connected to Covid-19.
This applies to both the method of recording “deaths within 28 days of a Covid-19 diagnosis” and also accounting for deaths with “Covid-19 on the death certificate”. The “excess” mortality minus either of the other two measures strongly attests to under accounting of the true numbers of deaths with Covid-19. Comparing this first wave to the later winter 2020-2021 wave strongly supports such a conclusion, as does the analysis of where people died during that first wave, notably care-homes.
In addition the simple recorded statistic of the percentage of tests that proved that the tested person was actually positive for Covid-19 entirely correlates with the rates of “excess” deaths from the middle of March 2020 to the summer of 2021, albeit ultimate mortality being lagged by a few weeks from testing and "diagnosis".
Another very interesting finding that emerges during the second wave in the winter of 2020-2021, when testing capacity was able to capture the vast majority of symptomatic cases and thus allow documented tracking of severity of illness through to the death of some of those with Covid-19, is that Covid-19 very clearly effectively killed or contributed to killing some people who, at least numerically, would have been amongst the simplistically defined number of “expected” deaths. This suggests the strong and deadly virulence of this new disease for those who are amongst the vulnerable groups of the population.
The pointers to vulnerability to this disease emerged very early and essentially suggest the over-arching risk is by age range, and within age other health vulnerabilities, including diabetes, heart issues and respiratory issues amongst others.
The relative distribution of age ranges for the total recorded, “expected” and thus “excess” deaths are all very similar throughout the whole period from the start of 2020 to-date. The only exception being that during 2022 and 2023, there are no consistent counts of rates of “excess” deaths in England & Wales for people under the age of 15. Thankfully in the 21st century the numbers of youngsters and infants who die each year is now quite low and as such can be subject to some volatility, especially on a weekly basis.
Whilst the numbers of hospitalisations, acute illnesses and deaths during the pandemic amply attest to the severity of the disease, the number of excess deaths not involving direct effects of Covid (within 28 days of a diagnosis or recording Covid-19 on the death certificate) from the summer of 2021 began to be notable. It is this pattern and count (both weekly and accumulated) that has continued to the end of 2023 that is very serious.
A note here is worth emphasising, that no correlation is found between administration of the emergency vaccines and subsequent excess deaths. Of course some individuals had both immediate and possibly even delayed negative reactions to the vaccines, but it is often impossible to distinguish long-term after-effects of Covid-19 from the vaccines themselves.
It is again necessary to consider two facets of how “excess” deaths might be counted. As before, the first facet of the method by which the number of “expected” deaths is calculated drives the over-arching all-cause “excess” mortality.
The method adopted by the ONS until the end of 2021 was to compare 2020s and then 2021s registered weekly deaths to the simple 5 year average (mean) from 2015 to 2019 for each corresponding week. For 2022 the ONS made the decision to derive a new average (mean) of the corresponding weeks from 2016 to 2019 but also incorporating deaths from 2021. For 2023 the average (mean) is calculated from data for 2017 to 2019 but also incorporating deaths from both 2021 and 2022.
These choices have significant issues in trying to assess outcomes in 2022 and beyond and resulting "excess" all-cause mortality, as 2021 was a year with significant waves of Covid-19 mortality, driven by the Kent/(alpha or beta) variant from January 2021 to the end of March 2021 followed by the Indian/delta variant from July 2021 to the end of 2021. Both of these variants proved themselves to be quite deadly in-spite of the clear benefits of improved health interventions, including the new emergency vaccines.
Notably from December 2021 the South African/omicron variant rapidly dominated thereafter due to it being far more contagious, but thankfully less virulent, resulting in much reduced infection mortality rates throughout 2022 and 2023, despite a multitude of further mutations and omicron sub-variants repeatedly emerging.
The final significant facet of the method of counting “excess” deaths revolves around the question of when, if at all, one might regard Covid-19 as being endemic and how one therefore counts Covid-19 connected deaths as part of the “expected” counts or not.
Notably from January 2022 to the end of April 2022 there was no “excess” all-cause mortality as calculated by any measure of "expected" deaths, despite continuous counts of deaths within 28 days of a Covid-19 diagnosis and also with Covid-19 on the death certificate. It is this basic numerical fact that allows us to posit the idea that one might reasonably treat Covid-19 as entirely endemic from January 2022, and is itself supported by the interesting reduction in infection fatality rates from the time of the dominance of the omicron variant amongst the population.
The question that then remains still unanswered is, regardless of the resulting calculation of non-Covid “excess” mortality rates, what are the causes of these large numbers of “excess” mortality that are consistently in the weekly figures from July 2021 to December 2021, then from May 2022 to the end of 2023.
All of these questions and outcomes are explored in the presentations made available here in each collection as titled accordingly.
It should be noted as well that in June 2023, the Institute of Economic Affairs, based in London, published a new detailed study of the possible effects of lockdown in the spring of 2020.
The IEA announcement "Lockdowns were a costly failure, finds new IEA book" is downloadable from here...
The IEA book "Did lockdowns work? The verdict on Covid restrictions", by Jonas Herby, Lars Jonung and Steve H. Hanke, June 2023. IEA is downloadable from here...
The co-authors respectively from the Centre of Political Studies in Denmark, University of Lund in Sweden and Johns Hopkins University in the USA, have conducted a major analysis of data surrounding mortality outcomes for many different nations in the spring of 2020 and concluded that the number of lives "saved" by the lockdowns were "a drop in the bucket compared to the staggering collateral costs" and that "the policy of lockdowns represents a global policy failure of gigantic proportions".
My analysis here then pursues the obvious comparison of outcomes for the UK (and in particular England & Wales) with the outcomes for particularly Sweden, but supplemented with multiple extended comparisons with Sweden’s Scandinavian neighbours, but also a general comparison with 16 advanced and developed nations.
To supplement this a deeper analysis of Sweden’s outcome in 2020 is made against their all-cause “excess” mortality during 1918 and 1919. This analysis clearly re-emphasises the far more deadly relative effect of Spanish flu in 1918 than the recent Covid-19 pandemic.
It is worth noting that whilst Sweden did not implement or enforce so-called “lockdown” measures, unlike most of the world’s nations, particularly western, developed nations, it did none-the-less recommend many protections to it’s citizens. However, exactly as the UK, they made disastrous decisions in handling of older and particularly care home residents that resulted in many extra deaths during the spring of 2020 that might otherwise have been reduced.
Thus direct comparisons between the UK and Sweden are particularly revealing of the traditional pandemic plan implemented by Sweden versus the sudden adoption of a response akin to that imposed in China.
The consequences of these “lockdown” measures that has wrought so much damage to people’s livelihoods, the economy in general, children’s education and multiple aspects of people’s health and well-being are only slowly emerging and many are likely to spread their unwanted effects for years to come.
Fortunately, despite the panic, and frankly hysterical plunge into authoritarian irrationality, many voices spoke up at the time and have continued to speak out strongly against such irrationality.
These voices are amongst the most credentialed and knowledgeable that we have amongst us, including: Professor Jayanta "Jay" Bhattacharya, Doctor Martin Kulldorff, Professor Sunetra Gupta, Professor Carl Heneghan, Professor Karol Sikora, Doctor Viscount Matthew Ridley, Doctor Alina Chan and not least Doctor Anders Tegnell and Professor Johan Giesecke who both guided Sweden to what now appears to be amongst some of the best longer term outcomes from the Covid-19 pandemic, despite the failure of the Swedish state to effectively manage care home residents and their needs.
It should be noted that Professor Bhattacharya, Doctor Kulldorff and Professor Gupta were the authors of “Great Barrington Declaration” of October 2020 calling for some rationality and were near universally condemned by those in power and authority, including Doctor Kulldorff being dismissed from Harvard in March 2024.
Professors Bhattacharya and Gupta went on to found Collateral Global ( here... ) in November 2020 and along with a multitude of others have continued to research and investigate the profound collateral harms caused by the irrational policies of “lockdown”, so vigorously prosecuted in 2020 and 2021.
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