Why Johnson is right about UK’s Covid death rate
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A curious revisionism occurred at the Covid Inquiry on Wednesday when Hugo Keith KC claimed that Britain’s pandemic death rate was the second worst in Europe.
Boris Johnson was quite rightly perplexed by this line of questioning, given that by most measures, the UK did not do too badly.
Last year, a major report published in The Lancet calculated the Covid excess death rates for 191 countries and territories and found that the UK was roughly in the middle at 102.
Britain was found to have an excess death rate of 126.8 people per 100,000, very close to France – which had 124.4 per 100,000 – and Germany, with 120.5 per 100,000.
European countries that did worse than us included Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Bulgaria, Poland and Lithuania.
Sweden, which did not lock down, was found to have one of the best excess death rates in Europe, with 91.2 per 100,000. Only Finland, Luxembourg and Iceland fared better.
In fact, the UK excess death rate is close to the average global excess death rate of 120 per 100,000.
Likewise, a comparison of European age-standardised mortality rates published at the end of last year by the Office for National Statistics found Britain to be mid-table, coming 15th out of 33 countries.
Mr Johnson pointed out that from the data he had seen, Britain was “well down the European table and well down the world table”.
Mr Keith responded: “In Western Europe, we were one of the worst off, if not the second worst off,” but failed to say where he had found these statistics.
Perhaps we will find out on Thursday when documents relating to Mr Johnson’s evidence are published following the conclusion of his testimony.
‘They could both be correct’
John Roberts, who was a member of the Covid-19 Actuaries Response Group, said that both Mr Johnson and Mr Keith could be correct “based on the time period they referred to”, arguing that waves hit different countries at different times.
And as Mr Johnson pointed out, there are good reasons why Britain struggled to keep deaths down.
We have an older population, many of whom suffer from conditions such as obesity and diabetes, which are known to raise the risk of death from Covid-19.
Our population is also one of Europe’s largest, and mainly packed into urban areas.
A good example of the effect of this can be seen by comparing us to Ireland, which came 13th best for excess deaths in the Lancet study.
However, the population density of Ireland is approximately 186 people per square mile compared to 727 people in the UK. And while 83 per cent of Britons live in urban areas, just 63 per cent of Irish people do.
The German population density is also lower than the UK at 623 people per square mile and France, which has consistently been lower than Britain, is just 309 people per square mile.
Just 76 per cent of Germans live in urban areas and 81.5 per cent of French people, again lower than the UK.
London, which saw the most cases in the first wave, is also the largest city in western Europe, with nearly nine million people. In contrast, Berlin has 3.7 million and Paris 2.1 million.
The median age of citizens is also likely to play a role in the final death figures. Italy did particularly badly but its median age is 47.3 years while Ireland’s is 38.2. Britain is 40.7.
Given all these variables, it is likely that a definitive league table of which country did best in the pandemic will never be achievable, particularly as excess deaths from the Covid response continue to mount.
But based on current figures, Britain is not an outlier and it is wrong for the inquiry to cast us as the Covid pariah of Europe.
