Not Yet Time For Self Congratulations
The UK Government funds the Office of National Statistics (ONS). The ONS gathers all sorts of data about the United Kingdom. Those datasets are invaluable when we have to draw inference and describe various aspects of our lives – from health to economics.
The Freedom of Information Act of Parliament dates back to 2000 (see it here). The act empowers citizens to request information held by public authority. Thanks to this act, sourcing the data needed to compare COVID19 and Influenza by mortality was easier than expected. On 30th of November 2020, somebody asked the ONS to provide the data it held on influenza mortality rate between 2015 and 2020. You can see the response from ONS here. The key outcome is this table, copied from the same location:
Over 5 years, there were 3,976 deaths due to influenza, an average of 796 deaths a year. When you add pneumonia which tends to occur with flu, the mortality rate goes up to 27,345 a year.
In the rest of this article, I have link to some of the datasets I used. If you don’t want to download those links to your device, please do not navigate to them. The data sources are reputable ones and only contain data in either Microsoft Excel or comma separated formats.
The ONS also gathers COVID19 data. The latest data published for 2022 is here. If you follow the link and you have an app that can read Microsoft Excel file, you can go to the tab captioned 5 to see the details of COVI9 records for January 2021 to January 2022. It will show a total of 73,759 deaths. The ONS has data for Jan 2020 to Jan 2021 and you can find it here. This showed that England and Wales recorded a total of 80,830 deaths between January 2020 and January 2021. We can deduce average yearly mortality rate due to COVID19 is 77,295. This means COVID19 is almost three times deadlier than Influenza and Pneumonia.
Of course the UK Government would naturally prefer not to use this metric to view the pandemic, probably preferring Deaths to Cases ratio, which can be used to justify a lower death rate. Comparing COVID19 to Influenza is a false equivalence because the former is almost three times deadlier than the latter.
As our government here loves to tell us how wonderful we are doing compared to other countries in Europe in our COVID19 fight, let’s look at whether there is evidence to support this.
Below I show the top ten countries in Europe by cases of Coronavirus (data source) since the beginning. The United Kingdom tops this chart. We have close to twice what was recorded in Germany, Spain and Italy. Health professionals have highlighted the emergency of “Long COVID” in some COVID19 survivors. This means that there may be cost (health and otherwise) attached to a policy that supports huge number of COVID19 incidence as we currently do, in the long term.
You can also see the top ten countries in Europe by mortality (data source):
Russia leads the way, followed by the United Kingdom. Whether you look at the number of cases or number of deaths, the United Kingdom is in the Top 2 in Europe. Not yet time for self congratulations.
The total number of deaths in in the United Kingdom was 527,234 in 2019 (source), 614,114 in 2020 (source) and 585,899 in 2021 (source). Compared to 2019, 2020 saw a rise of 16% in deaths, while 2021 saw a rise of 11%. Is it really time for self congratulations, rather than sober reflection? How can we be patting ourselves on the back faced with these horrendous statistics? Is it not too premature to compare COVID19 to Influenza when the latter represented only 4.9% of the deaths in 2019? Where is the evidence that we have weathered COVID better in the UK than the rest of Europe?
