Why Did Excess Deaths Not Drop After Covid?

“I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.” I’m with Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman on this. Consequently, this article may raise more questions than answers.

One such question would be: if the worst ‘pandemic’ in 100 years pulled forward literally millions of deaths, why hasn’t there been a subsequent trough? And this isn’t a phenomenon we’ve seen only in the U.K.; if anything, it’s been far more pronounced in Asia.

Professor David Livermore, in a recent article about life in post-pandemic Taiwan, referred to the current high excess death rate in many Asian countries. It wasn’t something of which I had been particularly conscious. A quick look at Our World in Data confirmed his claim. Excess deaths in Singapore and Taiwan since the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022 have remained remarkably high. These were countries where the populations largely escaped high death tolls throughout the ‘pandemic’ and where the lockdowns tended to be fairly light-touch, but where the take-off in excess deaths followed the vaccine rollout in 2021 and 2022.

You’ll notice that the comparator data in Figure 1 is from 2015-2019. While in the U.K. claims may be made that we saw significant immigration during this period (though, not on the whole among the elderly and vulnerable), the same cannot be said of Asian countries such as South Korea or Japan, where, whilst there continues to be a gradual ageing of the population, there is very little immigration. Thus the subsequent rise in deaths is not due to a related increase in population.

One of the enduring mysteries of the Covid pandemic was why Asian countries appeared to do so much better than Western nations. Covid deaths per million people were reported to have been about 10 times higher in the U.K. and much of the West than across Asian countries as a whole. Our World in Data report 3,404 deaths per million for the U.K. while for Asia the comparable figure was just 347.

Various reasons have been put forward for the discrepancy. A friend of mine, a great advocate of the official Covid narrative and a frequent visitor to Japan, used to assure me it was down to the Japanese’s pre-existing fondness for facemasks (he still thinks facemasks make a difference). Another theory he’s put to me is that it’s down to the Japanese preference for the bow rather than the handshake. Oddly, this belief survived the knowledge that transmission was via aerosol rather than touch. Many people attributed it to the leanness of Asians and their low-fat diet. As late as March 2022 the BMJ was publishing articles extolling Japan’s “success” in handling the ‘pandemic’, attributing it to their “compliance”. In any case, the point is that the explosion in excess deaths came once Covid deaths had dropped with the arrival of the Omicron variant, meaning the virus can’t be blamed any more than population increase can.

Another thing that’s not causing Asian excess deaths is a sudden drop in health spending. Japan and South Korea have seen an almost 20% rise in health spending per capita over the past five years, about twice the increase we’ve seen.

Figure 4 is a slightly busy chart showing all-cause excess mortality for the past two and a half years for the U.K. against a backdrop of Asian countries since April 2022. Notice anything?

That’s right. All of a sudden, the tables have turned. Now the U.K. has lower excess deaths than these Asian countries, yet oddly, while in 2020 Asia’s experience was the stick used to beat the U.K. over our hopelessness at contending with Covid, I can’t find any articles in the BMJ or anywhere else asking why Asians are now dying at such high rates. It seems odd that no one seems much interested when we were all so interested in similar levels of excess deaths in 2020.

Admittedly, the U.K. position isn’t much to write home about. Excess deaths have been hovering around the 10% level for the past two years. But they are now lower than our masked, bowing, lean Asian friends.

Figure 5 shows the cumulative profile of ‘all-cause’ excess deaths across the UK from January 2020 to the end of 2023. By the end of 2020, cumulative excess deaths were at 13%. By the end of 2023 they’d dropped, but only by three percentage points to 10%. And, where’s the compensating trough? How can we have all these deaths pulled forward without a corresponding drop in subsequent years? If the dry tinder’s been burnt where did the continuing excess deaths come from?

Now let’s look at Japan. Remarkably, the latest OWID figures for Japan show excess deaths to be 27% higher than in previous years. That’s more than twice the cumulative rate we experienced in 2020 (though Japan’s own cumulative rate is lower). As you can see from Figure 6, in Japan over the past 30 months, no month has had a lower rate of excess deaths than the 13% cumulative figure we experienced in 2020.

The situation in Singapore is similar. The latest excess death rate is 24%. Singapore has only seen two months over the past 30 months when excess deaths have dropped below 20%.

What’s the cause of all these excess deaths? Ageing populations are partly to blame, but that’s true in the U.K. too, and over just a few years this has a minimal impact. In Japan deaths from circulatory diseases, mainly heart failure, have increased significantly since 2020-21.

In the U.K., as can be seen in Figure 9, excess heart failure deaths from April 2021 were consistently high, frequently breaking the 20% excess barrier. As in Japan, excess deaths from heart failure in particular, while elevated, appear to be only a relatively small part of the overall story. But certainly there are questions to be answered.

I don’t know if there is any great clamour in South Korea, Taiwan or Japan to investigate what’s been going on, and if there is, whether those asking questions of the authorities have had any more success than we in the U.K. have managed, but I imagine not or we would likely have heard about it.

Finally, I’ve reproduced the excess deaths chart for the USA, where rates have also remained relatively high with no trough following the remarkably high excess deaths throughout 2020 and 2021.

I only look to the U.S. because it’s going to have RFK Jr in its corner. He’s got a lot on his plate, but we can hope that he will be able to set up a truly independent group to look further into this and just maybe some of these questions will be answered.