Coffee House Shots: What's behind the excess deaths statistics?

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🗓️ 4 August 2020

⏱️ 23 minutes

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Summary

Statistics released this week showed that England had the worst excess death rate in Europe during the first half of 2020. Katy Balls speaks to Kate Andrews and Carl Heneghan, professor of Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford University about what's behind the numbers.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Get 12 weeks of The Spectator in print and online for just £12.
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0:10.0	Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher.
0:20.0	Hello, welcome to a special Saturday edition of Coffee House Shops.
0:24.6	I'm Katie Balls and I'm joined by Kate Andrews and Carl Hannigan, Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford.
0:32.6	So we've got used to hearing the government say that we're world beating in many ways, but there has been a pattern when it comes to coronavirus and when it comes to leaked tables, we do stand out, but often for the wrong reason.
0:46.7	And this week we had worse news, which adds to that sense, which is that England is the highest level of excess deaths.
0:54.4	Kate, can you talk us through the statistics that have made lots of headlines this week
0:58.7	and what it says about the UK and the parts of it?
1:01.6	I think it helps actually if we go back to mid-May
1:04.0	when the government stopped publishing its international comparisons of COVID deaths.
1:08.6	It argued at the time that these comparisons weren't like for like, countries
1:13.0	were calculating the data differently, and it wasn't helpful, possibly even misleading to compare
1:18.0	at the time. They said there would be a time for doing that. So arguably, where the government
1:22.0	stopped publishing, the O&S, the Office for National Statistics, has now picked that up. And this week, they published
1:28.7	a number of all excess deaths across Europe. Now, it's very important to note that's not just
1:34.0	COVID-19 deaths. That's all excess deaths above a five-year average. So we could be talking about
1:39.9	COVID-19. We certainly are in many respects. We're also talking about the knock-on effects of COVID-19,
1:45.3	lockdown deaths, struggling to access treatment, lower numbers in A&E, and all of that. And the data
1:52.3	doesn't bode very well for the UK. England is found to have the highest number of excess deaths in
1:57.3	Europe so far. And England, Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland are all in the
2:02.9	top eight. And this is not the kind of list that you want to come top. Now, the most generous
	...

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