Three years down the line from when Covid first hit our consciousness and with the release of more time series data in digestible form some lessons can be learned from the Government’s capitulation to the ‘blob’s’ panicked measures in early 2020.
Undoubtedly the ‘one size fits all’ approach of Government at the start of the pandemic led to unnecessary deaths. I suspect the extent of these unnecessary excess deaths skewed the perception of many people about the risk they faced from Covid and also skewed the data which led, in turn, to bad decisions.
Back in March 2020, in anticipation of a wave of ill people it was decided to empty the hospitals. Go walk around a hospital, it’s full of ill people, they’re there for a reason. In England we expect about 225,000 people to die in hospital in any given year. The data in Table 1 come from my new favourite website produced by the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (its staff have got their work cut out!). They show deaths in English hospitals over the past three years.
One of the oddities of the data is that deaths with Covid are so much higher than excess deaths. In 2020 there were three times more Covid deaths than excess deaths. In 2021 there were 2.7 times more Covid deaths than excess deaths and in 2022 the figure was 1.75 times greater. Can it be true that in the absence of Covid we would have had so many fewer deaths than normal?
It’s often stated, and certainly I would suggest that the man on the Clapham omnibus would think, that hospitals were overrun during the first lockdown in spring 2020. This is only true to the extent that two things happened that massively reduced capacity: we socially distanced the beds, reducing the overall capacity in the hospitals and staff absences went up due to self-isolation or illness. Of course, we built the Nightingale hospitals but these were never brought into service.
Figure 2 shows two charts. The top one shows the percentage of the average General and Acute (G&A) hospital bed occupancy by NHS trusts during April 2020. The lower one shows average critical care bed occupancy during April 2020. Due to space I’ve only named every fifth NHS trust but if you want to look at the data for your local trust you can find them here.
Usually hospitals run at about 90% capacity, overall, during the lockdown they were about 55% full. Hospitals weren’t full, capacity was reduced.
At the bottom of each table sits Royal Cornwall NHS Trust. Its average bed occupancy rate during April 2020 was 38%. Its critical care bed occupancy rate was 19%. Conversely, there were still some hospitals with relatively high occupancy rates. Croydon Health Services NHS Trust was top of the league at 85% General and Acute bed average occupancy.
I’m not trying to get at the Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust; I suspect it did what it was told. No, my point is rather broader: decisions were in all likelihood taken miles away in London with little consideration of how this all would play out in Cornwall. How much more likely that we’ll end up with inappropriate decisions if the U.K. Government cedes pandemic control to the WHO, as spelt out by Dr. David Bell in his recent Daily Sceptic article?
Let’s look at how this all worked out in Cornwall. As you can see in Figure 3, which uses data specific to Cornwall, all-cause deaths peaked in week ending April 17th. In that week overall excess deaths were 53% higher than the expected level and in week ending April 24th they were 55% higher than expected. At this time there was very limited testing to confirm the presence of Covid so, whether all these deaths were from (or with) Covid will never be known. But, it does seem odd that over 50% more people were dying and yet the hospitals were less than 40% full and the ICU wards below 20% pre-Covid capacity.
There are two possible explanations for this huge rise in excess deaths:
- Covid, though the chart above shows that official Covid deaths accounted for about half of the excess deaths in April.
- The consequences of moving frail, ill people out of hospitals. Reductions in level of care associated with PPE protocols. Reductions in care home and care at home staff.
In a recent Daily Sceptic article, Nick Bowler looked at the rise in deaths other than respiratory illnesses. In Figure 4 you can see how deaths in England from some of these non-respiratory illnesses peaked during this first lockdown. How many of these excess deaths were down to policy? No doubt exactly the same pattern repeated itself in Cornwall: deaths of non-respiratory causes increased significantly due to the anticipation of a pandemic rather than because of a pandemic.
It seems deeply ironic that China recently abandoned its zero-Covid policy in favour of what we were constantly told was a ‘let it rip’ strategy, though really more like the strategy advocated by the U.K.’s Pandemic Preparedness Plan and the Great Barrington Declaration. And what were the consequences for China? Virtually nothing. Okay, we may not know much about what goes on inside the Chinese Government, but with one million Westerners living in China and a couple of million Chinese living in the West we have a pretty good feel for what’s going on in the street, and so far the Chinese ‘great reopening’ has gone pretty smoothly. Predictions of millions of deaths seem to be wide of the mark. It’s amazing, when you leave people to make their own risk estimates and to take responsibility for themselves, they usually make a pretty good job of it.
Of course, we had our own ‘great reopening’ in July 2021 when cases, hospitalisations and deaths promptly fell.
All this leads me to the conclusion that you should be wary of big Government saying “we’re here to help”.
This article has been updated. An earlier version incorrectly stated that excess deaths in hospitals in England were higher than Covid deaths.
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One of the oddities of the data is that excess deaths in hospital are so much higher than deaths with Covid in hospital. In 2020 there were three times more excess deaths than deaths with Covid. In 2021 there were 2.7 times more excess deaths than deaths with Covid and in 2022 the figure was 1.75 times greater. Why have all these people been dying in hospital without Covid?
Am I misreading this? It seems to be the other way round on the table. Deaths with COVID are higher than excess deaths
Same here.
The article has now been corrected.
Thanks Duncan. Now corrected and noted. Apologies.
I’d have thought the reality of the world we’re now living in is testament enough to the collateral damage caused by pressing the pause button on life, which is going to take years, perhaps decades to make up any losses (if at all possible – I’ve this feeling we ain’t seen nothing yet, besides we’ve got climate lockdowns and cyber polygon to go yet), but.. I’ll take any ‘data’ that supports this fact. Perhaps those numbnuts at the BBC will run a similar article seeing as the health of the nation is essential for peace & posterity?
Don’t forget intubation, midazolam and dnr notices. Wasn’t the first wave manufactured. Covid was already circulating the previous year and all regions had the first wave at the same time even though community infection levels were at different stages of progression.
The ratios between those dying in hospital, the community and at home were very unnatural too.
The old saying “the cure’s worse than the disease” was certainly true, with regard to the policies implemented from March 2020. As Lancer says, we ain’t seen nothing yet.
Lockdowns Are Deadly to humanity
Stand in the Park Make friends & keep sane
Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am
Elms Field
near Everyman Cinema & play area
Wokingham RG40 2FE
Follows a fragment of my post of Aug 06, 2020 at 4:37 pm, “UK Covid19 Deaths Inflated? Lockdown kills!” in the Statistics and Modelling forum.
I was, and am, convinced the appalling death toll of spring 2020 was more a function of neglect than disease. I am also convinced the appalling death toll of winter 2021 was a function of neglect and vaccines.
Once the authorities lurched into their lockdown catastrophe they needed enough deaths to justify the disastrous policy but not so many as to suggest their policy wasn’t working. An invidious political position.
The lockdown deaths are buried under a filthy midden of spurious Covid statistics. I still don’t understand how so many Alzheimer’s and Dementia excess deaths were attributed to Covid19. What makes a patient suffering from neurological disease particularly susceptible to a respiratory virus? It didn’t, and still doesn’t, scan………
“A recent Public Health England report raises the possibility that Covid-19 deaths have been routinely over reported thereby inflating the lethal potential of the Sars-Cov2 virus while masking the fatal consequences of the lockdown policy.
If correct, the implication is that the Sars-Cov2 virus is no more lethal than a moderately bad year of flu which would generally pass without any comment at all. The policies introduced to tackle the virus have left a wake of devastation that is hard to comprehend, additionally, they may have killed thousands.
On the 14th July 2020 Public Health England published the report, “Excess Mortality in England, week ending 03 July 20 20.” The report is described as an attempt to understand the impact of Covid-19 and covers a 15 week period from 20.03.20 to 03.07.20 presenting excess deaths by age, sex, region, ethnic group, level of deprivation, cause of death and place of death.
Table 8 details excess deaths in care homes, private homes, hospices, hospitals and other places. Hospitals are the only setting in which every one of the 14,299 excess death is attributed to Covid-19, moreover, Covid-19 accounts for another 16,033 deaths in hospitals before the estimated excess death figure is reached. If Covid-19 deaths are removed from the figures, the registered deaths in hospitals would be 25% lower than the expected five year average. There is nothing to suggest any such significant trend in the 15 week period prior to 20.03.20.
In figure 35a, Excess Deaths in England by Underlying Cause of Death, the only conditions showing no excess deaths are respiratory diseases. It appears many deaths normally attributed to acute respiratory infection, chronic lower respiratory disease and other respiratory disease have been attributed to Covid-19.
Every other underlying condition records significant excess deaths with a striking similarity. There are many more excess deaths attributed to the underlying conditions than the virus. The report acknowledges the figures and accepts there may have been more deaths due to the underlying conditions but doesn’t offer any explanation for the rise. The report does suggest there may have been some under-reporting of the virus to account for the findings.
We should consider the possibility that the excess deaths due to underlying causes are at least correct and may even be under-reported and that many of these deaths may have been a result of the lockdown policy. The Financial Times reports the cabinet discussed lockdown deaths as early as 12 April and a Whitehall official is quoted as saying, “Most of the cabinet are aware that the lockdown is harming the nations health and its economy, but its collateral damage to save lives from caronavirus.”…………. (continues)”
“One of the oddities of the data is that deaths with Covid are so much higher than excess deaths… Can it be true that in the absence of Covid we would have had so many fewer deaths than normal?”
The explanation for this is fairly obvious: many of the “deaths with Covid” were not excess deaths. This is not just because many of the deaths with Covid were not deaths from Covid. It is also because those who died from Covid were mostly frail elderly people who would otherwise have died from something else.
During the first lockdown the ambulance station across the road was struggling to fing room to park up all their disused ambulances and cars! The hospital behind us was virtually empty and in April, despite becoming the National Covid Service, only 2 people were in the “covid ward”. Also opposite us at massive cost and disruption they converted our leisure centre into a Nightingale hospital that was never used.