Why does England have the worst excess deaths in Europe?
On 12 May, the government stopped publishing international comparisons of its Covid-19 death toll in the daily press briefings. The argument was that the data wasn’t helpful, and perhaps even misleading: the way calculations were carried out varied country-by-country, with each nation on a different timescale when experiencing the peak of infections and death. There would be a time for international comparisons, but that time wasn’t now. Today, the ONS picks up where the press briefings left off, comparing excess mortality rates throughout Europe. The data is not specifically calculating Covid-19 deaths, but rather all causes of mortality on a five-year average. This is the metric the UK’s chief medical officer