Deaths from heart failure in the 15 weeks from week ending March 24th 2023 to the end of June 2023 were 27% higher than the level expected for the same period in 2020. Why?
The Office for Health Improvement and Disparities has produced the data for England. They show that from week 12 to week 26 of 2020 there were expected to be 16,752 heart failure deaths. Whereas in 2023 from week 12 to week 26 17,825 deaths were expected. For some reason we expect 6% more people to die of heart failure now than we did three years ago, even more of a surprise when you consider that the ‘pandemic’ was supposed to have cut a swathe through the ‘dry tinder’! In the event 21,222 people died from heart failure in England during this period in 2023.
Figure 1 shows weekly deaths from heart failure since week 12 of 2020. You can see, with or without Covid linked deaths, there has been a significant and sustained increase.
An article published in the Telegraph by consultant cardiac surgeon Julian Gaer focuses on the failings of the NHS to provide timely and effective treatment for cardiac patients. It’s an interesting read but, to my mind somewhat partial, though he’s very clear about where the blame lies:
I do blame a system that has allowed us to reach the point of having dangerous shortages of permanent skilled staff and dilapidated facilities habitually operating at 100% of theoretical capacity (something the NHS hierarchy persists in believing demonstrates value-for-money). I blame the fact that the U.K. has fewer hospital beds per capita than all but five of 38 OECD countries (Mexico, Costa Rica, Colombia, Chile, Sweden). France has three times more hospital beds per capita than the U.K. and Germany four times. Germany has 29 intensive care beds per 100,000 population, whereas the U.K. has seven. Little wonder therefore that Germany recorded just over 2,000 Covid deaths per million of the population, for our 3,000-plus.
So, according to Mr. Gaer it’s all about money and resources. But, let’s just see where Mr. Gaer gets his numbers from in relation to Covid deaths in Germany and the U.K.
Figure 2 is taken from Our World in Data and shows cumulative Covid deaths from the beginning of January 2020 to July 12th 2023, the day before Mr. Gaer’s article was published.
You can see that, as Mr. Gaer asserts, Covid deaths in Germany over the past three-and-a-half years are recorded as about 2,000 per million compared to the U.K.’s 3,376 per million. However, this variance is wholly due to the course of the pandemic from March 2020 to March 2021, by which point all the variance we see now had already occurred. Is he claiming that Germany’s relatively low number of deaths during the first year of the pandemic was wholly down to its treatment protocols, higher number of ICU beds and the organisation of its healthcare systems? If that’s the case, why did Germany’s Covid deaths match ours for the subsequent two-and-a-half years? Except for Sweden and Belarus, all European countries followed the same public health policies but with hugely variable outcomes, Finland saw one sixth of the Covid deaths that Germany did. Was this because Finland’s health service was superior to Germany’s? Of course not.
Rather than just looking at Covid deaths let’s look at all-cause excess deaths and compare the U.K. to Germany. Most experts agree that all-cause deaths is a far better measure of how a healthcare system works, rather than just the narrow focus on Covid deaths.
Again, a chart from Our World in Data illustrates perfectly that since the beginning of 2020 cumulative excess deaths in the U.K. stand at about 3,134 per million, whereas in Germany they’re 725 per million lower at 2,409 per million. However, all this difference and more was accounted for in the first Covid wave. By June 14th 2020 cumulative all-cause excess deaths in the U.K. were 1,001 per million higher than in Germany (868 – 133 = 1,001).
Since the U.K.’s March 7th 2021 pandemic peak, all-cause excess deaths in the U.K. have been lower than in Germany. While we’ve recorded 1,433 per million excess deaths the Germans have seen 35% more at 1,932 per million. To what does Mr. Gaer attribute the failure of Germany’s healthcare system over this period?
It doesn’t look like it’s British exceptionalism that accounts for the relative performance of the U.K. or German healthcare systems. In the same way that when you look a little more closely the apparent variance between Germany and the U.K. becomes obscured, so it is with excess heart deaths. Mr. Gaer would appear to attribute the rise in heart failure deaths to NHS failings in treatment and delivery. If this were the case, why don’t we see the same thing with cancer deaths?
Figure 4 reproduces charts from the Office for Health Improvements and Disparities showing excess deaths from heart failure and cancer from week ending March 26th 2021 to the end of June 2023. Cancer deaths are tracking the expected rate while heart failure deaths are dramatically elevated.
Figure 5 compares heart failure deaths with that other big killer, dementia and Alzheimer’s. Surely, if the NHS is letting down heart failure patients it must also be failing these patients?
It would seem not. Over the past two years or so dementia and Alzheimer’s deaths have been well below the expected rate.
Figure 6 illustrates another issue that’s been too much ignored. Since the beginning of the pandemic, with the exception of the two short spikes in April of 2020 and January of 2021, excess deaths in hospitals haven’t been exceptional. However, excess deaths ‘at home’ shot up and have consistently stayed high.
Whatever is causing the alarmingly elevated rate of heart failure deaths, it is not currently causing elevated deaths from cancer or dementia and thus it is hard to see how the primary driver can be the failings of the health service, however acute. For the same reason it is hard to see how the explanation can lie in an ageing population. Something else has seriously impacted on heart health in particular over the past three years.
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This might be the pin that bursts the bubble of higher ‘education’.
Silver linings etc.
No silver lining at all. Just a retreat to the caves.
… as the ‘Jerk’ foreshadows.
I’ve made the same point or asked the same question: Why are so many parents adamant that their children should be educated by such people?
Too many young people trust the media
We kill two to save one” (FDA expert Steve Kirsch )
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SybALRvPmd4
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The evil loons in the government and SAGE opened Pandora’s Box and they wouldn’t know how to get it closed again even if they wanted to. They’ve wrecked large portions of civilisation for decades at least and given a license for people to use covid as an excuse for all sorts of crap they could not have got away with before.
Where do these university lecturers go shopping? Aren’t all of the supermarkets full of ‘The Virus’??!!
A lot of lecturers and academics are doing to be unemployed soon. Their work outsourced to a much smaller number of much more capable academics worldwide who will deliver lectures online.
Having watched jobs in my industry, IT, being outsourced wholesale to the developing world and no-one in the “professions” giving a toss, I won’t be mourning the loss of these jobs.
There are too many universities in the UK in any case, churning out third rate graduates with third rate degrees in subjects with no value in the real world, consigning said graduates to menial work or unemployment and a sizeable burden of debt.
Sour grapes won’t solve these problems. It would take someone in It to come up with that bollocks about on-line teaching – straight into the trap.
I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally wrong with using online options to improve the overall offering, and deliver it with a reasonable combination of efficiency and quality. So if things are pushed a little in that direction, it’s arguably not all bad. Trouble is, the wrong things will probably end up getting done for the wrong reasons.
In my firm, we’re working from home a lot more than we used to before covid and I think on balance it’s an improvement – and I say that grudgingly because I hate to admit anything good could have come of the panic. But we’ve hopefully used it as a catalyst to make better use of time and technology.
If the online learning in unis is being done as naked cost-saving, or pandering to lazy or politicised or terrorised staff, I would agree it’s far from ideal.
“I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally wrong with using online options to improve the overall offering”
Nor do I. Where appropriate. But it’s an adjunct – not a substitute.
And I would fully support real flexible working – but that is different from teaching and learning, and also cannot replace social interaction.
A close family member is a Fellow at one of those universities. We have had lots of arguments about the pusillanimity of academe, its administration and unions, over this. But he hates the current situation, and not having (different context to undergraduate teaching, where contact is even more vital) even Doc and post-Doc students not being physically present so much.
Yes indeed, where appropriate, and the current climate and the context in which this is being done doesn’t bode well.
FWIW my daughter did a year of online lectures and hated it – I think they were done pretty well, to be fair, and I think she learned OK, but she just hated not being in the same room as her coursemates.
… and we’re talking just about lectures. So much more of HE is about growing up and social interaction. I know – I spent too much time on the latter
Oh for sure, she missed out on a year of societies, clubs and socials which she had been passionate about. She made the best of it by seeing people as much as possible, illegally, but it’s not the same.
So – Finger Jerk – what exactly is your problem with that? It’d be interesting to know.
Well I work in an IT dept at a Uni that is (or would like to think it is) one of the other 24 top institutions. I work on an open-plan floor that has desks for 70-80 from various departments and right now…. it’s just me. Two colleagues were in earlier, mind.
Lazy, politicised or terrorized staff isn’t entirely wide of the mark in my observation. In fairness few are genuinely lazy; they’ve just spotted an opportunity to work in a way that’s more convenient for them. Still, a little customer focus wouldn’t go amiss.
My own contact with students is minimal anyway (like who needs that??). Just a couple of days a year. There is a perennial problem here and presumably elsewhere of academics being hired on the strength of their research record, and only grudgingly performing their teaching commitments. A pandemic is as good an excuse as any to beaver away in the backroom on the research which is what you really wanted to do all along.
The union is certainly politicized on the issue, and some academics and support staff too. There have been a few posters up around campus and town indicating what our students think of the uni and its policies and staff around Covid and when I’ve shared photos around my colleagues to draw attention to the dissatisfaction the reaction is invariably dismissive or the subject gets changed.
Fear undoubtedly plays a strong part as well. Uni staff are largely drawn from a demographic that considers the output of the Guardian and the BBC as divine revelation. And though they’re mainly bright and well-educated, questioning orthodoxy is a rarer talent. A minority confide quietly that they can see that it’s all a pile of poo, but the rest stare fearfully over their enormous masks with panic in their eyes. They’ll return to face-to-face working when the students are hosed down with strong disinfectant first. A cynic might point out that most students dowse themselves with strong disinfectant most nights of the week of course, but I jest.
The University sector and those of us who work in it should indeed be careful what we wish for, however some overdue reappraisal of what higher education is for and who it should be pitched at might not be a long term harm for the nation or its young people.
My views are almost certainly not those of my employer
Thanks for the insights
I should have added that at my institution at least, the top brass actually are committed to returning to in-person teaching, or at any rate claim to be. I think they’re being sincere, though perhaps also mindful of the risk that students might very well jump ship to the OU. It’s the UCU and lower grade academicos who are dragging their feet for one reason or another, hence higher management has to move cautiously.
The announced aspiration is to return to more-or-less full face-to-face teaching with some hybrid by late spring next year, but there are interests within HE who will like use any tactic they can to delay that milestone as long as possible. And the Guardianocracy will help them all the way.
As a former OU tutor, I would heartily recommend doing your degree with the OU, if you have to do one at all before Bozo and his fellow devils are sent back to hell, where they belong. The OU is cheaper, offers vastly more individual attention, probably has higher standards, and has four decades’ experience in effective distance learning.
Sadly the OU isn’t cheaper any more. When I did my OU degree fees were a few hundred pounds per module, now they’re several thousand!
Inflation is the real elephant in this room. Inflation in “higher education” is far higher than inflation in most categories. At some point, won’t parents or students start to question if a lifetime of debt is worthy the sticker price of higher education? I think some are starting to work the numbers and question the value of these diplomas. Many more need to do this though.
From purely person experience with my kids, from a purely financial point of view, probably one of them will come out ahead of the game from their degree and one perhaps will lose a little, but then the one that loses probably won’t need to repay all or maybe even any of the loan. If you never earn enough, UK student loans are simply written off by HMG.
But they got other things from the experience. It’s certainly the most cost effective way to educate, in all cases, and maybe for some it’s a waste of time and energy for all concerned and they’d be better off pursuing some other path. I think on balance too many go, at least given the courses they do when they get there.
Girl on the telly this afternoon said she had a degree in jazz dancing.
Degrees in making mud pies are round the corner. Only virtual ones, though.
This would be fine were they willing to agree a corresponding reduction of fees. Which, of course, they won’t be doing. I think they are digging their own graves with this long term as youngsters may as well just get a job and go via the Open University if they want to learn online.
Not sure how fine it is. Universities can only function at current levels because the state underwrites the student “loan” system, which is not really a proper loan but a tax on the better paid graduates, so the state should tell unis they have to open properly, as schools have.
I agree. It is quite bizarre though. The State seems unwilling to tell universities to get back to work. Ditto GPs and ditto schools where the unions basically seem to be running the show. BJ does not seem to have any kind of stomach for a fight with any of them.
“BJ does not seem to have any kind of stomach for a fight with any of them.” I’m not sure what his incentive would be to have such a fight. Until he feels public opinion is turning against him because those services are remaining online, he can leave them be.
Blow Job et al. have created a Frankenstein’s monster that they are both reluctant and unable to control.
But they’ve been very successful in creating psychosis.
“But they’ve been very successful in creating psychosis.” Indeed, the “nudge unit” – sadly anything but incompetent. Every time I see an old boy or an old dear shuffling around our open air market with a mask on it makes me want to go punch SAGE’s lights out.
NameSusan Michie
AddressRoom 347 Research Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology University College London 1-19 Torrington Place London, WC1E 7HB
Telephone+44 (0)20 7679 5930
Fax+44 (0)20 916 8511
Emails.michie@ucl.ac.uk
It’s not just university lecturers who are doing themselves out of a job, doctors have largely adopted the same hands off approach to work.
US now allows “fully” vaccinated foreign visitors
Especially if they are bringing the “vaccine” proof Delta variant.
Of course this hasn’t stopped universities chartering aircraft to bring over Chinese and other overseas students. These students pay 2.5 times what U.K.students pay.
Oxford = Beijing-on-Thames.
“Private schools ‘pay agents in China up to £10,000 for each pupil they send to the UK’ amid fears British middle class families are being priced out”
“There should be no UK University or Public School places for Chinese citizens until China explains Covid.”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9849363/Private-schools-pay-agents-China-10-000-pupil-send-UK.html#comments
Can one even ask this question: How many college students in the UK or America have died “from” COVID? How many have even been hospitalized?
Is there not one statistics professor on any campus in the world who will tell us the probability a healthy college student will die from COVID? And then compare this risk to other health risks?
I took statistics in college and picked up a few nuggets on probabilities. I don’t know why I did this though. It doesn’t matter. Microscopic risks are enough to justify the eradication of basic liberties and freedoms.
“I don’t know why I did this though.”
Well – it gave you a grip on reality. The vast majority have no such anchor.
In the city where I went to university (and lived for a number of years afterwards) there is a large river, and every few years there would be unfortunate cases of pissed students falling in and drowning. I would not be at all surprised if the risk of this happening to the average student is actually higher than the risk of dying from Covid.
Shame on them all, the cowardly bastards.
Fuck university’s just money making crap hope they all go bang.
Wow! Such insight!
“The private and university schooling systems in this country has been focused in profiteering and not educating our own children as a priority for decades.”
Off topic (but is it really?): https://trialsitenews.com/ivermectin-wars-dr-hector-carvallo-versus-the-medical-establishment/
We’re on a fast-track towards Idiocracy. Many of us have been warning for years that TPTB are trying to dumb down our civilisation in order to make us compliant, and thanks to the covid scam, they’re fast-tracking this at a shocking pace.
Elsewhere, there’s talk of BSE making a sudden return in Somerset. This at the same time we’re being told about meat shortages at KFC and Nando’s, etc. At the same time the WEF Great Reset told us we’d stop eating meat and would adopt a new diet of eating bugs.
Lovely, thanks.
BSE, and other prion diseases, are a clear potential threat from the mRNA shots. See Dr. Stephen Fleming’s work for details.
University. The first stop on the middle class gravy train.
How about a class action legal suit against universities that refuse to teach in person classes?
Direct democracy right where it hurts.
Good on those three Unis that are going back to teaching. I hope that they reap the benefits in the future.
The majority of my undergrad and postgrad degree time was spent in the pub with my pals, chasing women and playing rugby. I emerged with the requisite piece of paper saying I had “a degree” which I soon found out was of zero practical use in the work place. The online experience just doesn’t really cut it.
I am losing the will to read these articles. Every single one misses the bigger and more important issue.
This covid hoax was never anything but a reason to destroy the Western world and show the poorer countries what will happen should they step out of line. The majority of virologists and immunologists have been saying this for some time.
When will the daily Sceptic start to look at the elephant in its room and discuss the reasons for the continued propaganda and fear. This country has been in fear since 2014 when Brexit was a real problem to the Globalists. We now have a Government fully determined to change the UK into a third world country. All because the plebs said NO to the increasing greed and corruption of Government and bureaucracy.
I am tired of endless graphs and tables following the line that Covid is real whilst flu and colds have disappeared off the world map. I am tired of hearing that vaccines work when so many are dying like never before after a jab. I am sick of hearing that young people die after ‘a short illness’ which hides the fact they were murdered. The depopulation agenda is not a conspiracy. Please start to address the real issues.
The sceptical segment of the population, itself a small minority, is a “broad church”. You are at one end of that spectrum. For me, I don’t think it’s an overt agenda because I think that would be impossible to cover up on a global scale, but I do believe certain groups stand to gain from the alleged pandemic and are deliberately exaggerating the situation.
I was quite happy to crack on with normal life last year before there was any “vaccine” and so I am incandescent with rage at where we now find ourselves. However I still maintain this is simply the government being manipulated by scientists and / or government taking action out of a sense of “being seen to be doing something”.
Durham was planning to do this before the ‘pandemic’ happened. It had absurd expansion plans that it simply couldn’t meet by cramming even more students into a tiny mediaeval city on a peninsula. The locals were furious and Town/Gown relationships were very bad. Then there was the mismatch between the ‘woke’ aspirations of the university establishment and the reality of the rugger-playing public school boys who make up much of its intake, and the bullying of local working class students, not to mention the pay dispute with the lecturers’ union. Going online was a way of hiding from the conflicts by removing the people. Now the locals are even more furious because their city has been filled with hideous and inappropriate university buildings that may never be fully used. Friends who teach music at Durham can see a serious threat to music as a discipline, as well as to the Anglican choral tradition in the college chapels; but no doubt that is part of the plan.
As with so many things, the virus is being used as an excuse for certain groups to achieve political aims.
What? My Virtue Signalling degree is now online?
You people have to realize that Coronavirus is the Flu, is the Coronavirus and it is not to be feared, but dealt with as soon as you get the symptoms in your head and nasal passages with my free salt water cure – it is so blindingly simple and yet, everyone needs “Experts” to tell them what to do, when those “Experts” are generally part of the scheme to kill off the lot of you. See Here: https://doctors4covidethics.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Vaccine-immune-interactions-and-booster-shots_Sep-2021.pdf
My free simple cure: I simply don’t understand why people get herded into taking vaccines which don’t work, according to my betters, however this is the Covid Crusher which would stop this Covid Pandemic dead, if everyone practiced it and it is free, from me:
The Achilles Heel of Coronavirus, is while it is still in the developing stage as Coronavirus/Covid in the warm, wet areas inside the nasal passages of your head (nose) and before it gets to become Covid in your head and lungs, 10 to 14 days later. If Coronavirus is not treated with my free iodine salt clean water cure to flush out your nasal passages, as soon as possible, or during self isolation, it becomes Covid, which is where the money is. You cannot catch Covid! Always breathe through your nose and keep your mouth shut, because you really don’t want the Coronavirus to seed itself in your lungs!! My free salt water cure has “absolutely nothing” to do with mRNA test vaccines. Treating Coronavirus with my free iodine salt clean water cure, flushes out the nasal cavity and kills Coronavirus, before it gets to be Covid, irrespective of if you have had mRNA vaccines or not. Mix one heaped teaspoon of iodine salt in a mug of warm or cold clean water, cup a hand and pour some of the solution in, then sniff or snort that mugful up into your nose, spitting out everything which comes down into your mouth, by so doing, you flush out your nasal cavity, where Coronavirus lives. If you get a burning sensation (which lasts for 2-3 minutes) then you have a Coronavirus infection.When the soreness goes away, blow out your head with toilet paper and flush away, washing your hands afterwards and continue doing my salt clean water nasal cavity flush cure, morning, noon and night, or more often, if you want, until, when you do my free salt water cure, you don’t experience any soreness at all in your nasal cavity. While you are at it, swallow a couple of mouthfulls and if you get a burning sensation in your chest, then you are killing the Covid/Bronchitis there too, so keep it up, each time you do a salt water sniffle, until the soreness in your head and lungs goes away – job done. Pour some of the solution on a flat surface and allow to dry and see what you have then. This is what coats the nasal passages in your head and kills Coronavirus/Covid off. You can see why it is so effective. This is what I have done for the past 27 years and I am NEVER ill, nor do you need to be either.
Please pass it around to everyone who wants to give it a try.
“Even so, a key issue is that the current vaccines block severe disease but do not prevent infection, said Dr. Gregory Poland, a vaccine scientist at the Mayo Clinic. That is because the virus is still capable of replicating in the nose, even among vaccinated people, who can then transmit the disease through tiny, aerosolized droplets”
Reuters – what my free salt water cure stops.
He added that “Current vaccines are great at preventing [CO1] serious infection deep in the lungs, but not at blocking infection in the upper airways. What’s needed is a nasal-spray (vaccine) that would stop the coronavirus from taking hold at all.” – what my free salt water cure does and stops.
No soreness when you do it, it feels like you are flushing your head with water, if you get sore reaction, you have a virus so deal with it, exactly as I have described above – did a sniffle today – Me, all OK!!
We all need a cure which works instead of these vaccines, when you get a Coronavirus infection – now you have one.
Do not use saline water bought online, use iodine based kitchen or sea salt, it is the iodine in the salt which kills Coronavirus dead
More to the point, try it on anyone with a Coronavirus infection and see what happens to the virus and how quickly it is killed in the nasal passages of the head. No Coronavirus, no Covid it would otherwise become. – Simple
Keep safe – Richard (smile)