Covid 19 death count: which countries are faring worst?
More or Less
BBC
4.6 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 20 February 2021
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Are different countries counting deaths from Covid 19 in the same way? Tim Harford finds out if we can trust international comparisons with the data available.
We discover Peru currently has the most excess deaths per capita over the course of the pandemic, while Belgium has the highest Covid death count per capita.
Tim speaks to Hannah Ritchie from Our World in Data and John Burn Murdoch, senior data visualisation journalist at the Financial Times.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service with a program that explores |
| 0:05.5 | the numbers all around us in the news and in life, and I'm Tim Halford. |
| 0:11.4 | Over the last year, it's been impossible to escape the grim league tables, |
| 0:16.0 | ordering countries according to their numbers of Covid-19 deaths. |
| 0:20.5 | But how useful are these rankings? Do they really tell us anything about how badly countries |
| 0:25.2 | have been affected by the pandemic and how they compare? To help me answer these |
| 0:29.6 | questions, I will be speaking to two extremely brilliant visualizers of data. Hannah Richey from |
| 0:35.9 | our world in data and John Byrne Murdoch, senior data visualization journalist at the Financial Times. |
| 0:44.7 | Let's start by looking at how countries official Covid death counts compare relative to the size of |
| 0:50.5 | their populations. When we look at these figures, the five worst affected countries are all in Europe. |
| 0:56.4 | Belgium has the highest Covid death count per capita, followed by Slovenia, in the UK, the Czech Republic, |
| 1:04.3 | and Italy. I asked Hannah Richey if official Covid death counts are representative of the real |
| 1:10.9 | death toll. I think when you look at it at a truly global level, we would assume that there are |
| 1:16.7 | many countries which are massively under-reporting, mainly because they're just not doing much testing. |
| 1:22.0 | But I think when you look at it across the spectrum of richer countries that have more rigorous |
| 1:27.9 | testing regimes, I think although there are differences in how they're recorded and reported, |
| 1:34.1 | overall their standards across most European countries are similar and similar enough that I think |
| 1:41.2 | we can do a reasonably fair assessment and comparison between countries. The way Covid deaths |
| 1:46.6 | accounted varies slightly from country to country. In the UK, the most commonly used statistic |
| 1:52.9 | includes everyone who's died within 28 days of a positive test. When you look at our peers and |
| 1:59.7 | our other rich countries in Europe, are they all basically using exactly the same standard? |
| 2:05.7 | There are slight differences between the way countries are reporting these deaths. For example, |
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