A very good article on the impact of the pandemic

There was an excellent and very comprehensive piece in the FT on Tuesday about the impact of the Coronavirus pandemic based on excess death figures. You can read it here.

I will be commenting in a bit more detail after today's council meeting.

It begins as follows:

"The human cost of coronavirus has continued to mount, with more than 136.6m cases confirmed globally and more than 2.9m people known to have died."

The article later explains the basis they have used for comparison:

"There are concerns, however, that reported Covid-19 deaths are not capturing the true impact of coronavirus on mortality around the world. The FT has gathered and analysed data on excess mortality — the numbers of deaths over and above the historical average — across the globe, and has found that numbers of deaths in some countries are more than 50 per cent higher than usual. In many countries, these excess deaths exceed reported numbers of Covid-19 deaths by large margins."

The article includes these charts and tables showing which countries have had the largest number of excess deaths in both absolute terms and per head of population, and how the death rate has varied over time by country compared with the five year average for the relevant time of year as successive waves of the pandemic have hit different countries.























It also reports on the efforts being made to vaccinate people around the world and other strategies to control the pandemic. In terms of excess deaths per head of population the FT ranks Britain just outside the twenty worst-hit countries at 21st out of the 48 countries for which they had enough reliable data to calculate excess deaths.

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