Reaction & Commentary
Expect based on previous year’s averages and i’m going to be giving evidence that suggests that this is not just a uk phenomena this is an international phenomenon but we’ve got good quality data from the uk so that’s where i want to look so that’s what this is about we’ll be
Giving some reasons why this might be happening and we’ll be trying to think a little bit about what we need to do about it as well but it is definitely happening there’s been anecdotal reports about footballers and things having heart attacks but this this is definite
Statistical data now so we can be sure about this evidence that we’re about to give so hundreds more people are dying per week in england and wales than usual and it’s not from covered office for national statistics covered deaths for the uk week of the 24th of june ending 346 people died from
Covered um not all of those from coverage some of those were with covered uh 17th of june it was 309 but the total deaths registered in the uk were 12 278. but this is the key thing this is nearly 16 above the five year average so way more people are dying than we
Would expect based on the previous five years way more than we would expect what is going on here obviously if more people are dying this is quite a big concern 16 15.9 more people than we would expect this week this time of year based on previous years not covered related
Latest breakdown for england and wales that we have here so the excess deaths deaths more than we would expect one thousand five hundred and forty covered deaths uh 285 uh about six percent of the covered deaths gave covered as the underlying cause so 166 were from covet and 119 were with covered
So um basically of this 285 quite a lot of those were basically incidental recordings on the death certificate so if we take non-covered excess deaths at uh 1 540 take away the covered deaths that means that the excess deaths that are not due to covered are 1374.
So these are excess deaths that are not due to covered this is too many to be a statistical artifact this is a genuine effect let’s just look at a couple of graphics so here we see the excess deaths the the the black line there the black
Marks there are what we would expect of course this is going to vary depending on the time of year but obviously we see in the in the covered pi uh spikes way more deaths due to covered as we would expect the dark blue of the death tutor covered but now we actually
See that um the deaths are above the five-year average but not attributable to cobit here’s a bit of a blow up of that so the covenant of the the the the deaths there in blue all the deaths or the deaths the other non-covered deaths are in green
And we see that these are above the five-year average and only a small proportion of those are due to covet only the blue bit is due to covered this one here where the deaths appear to be low the five year average uh it was a bank holiday in england and wales which
In the uk are unfortunately uh unfortunately depending on your perspective taken quite seriously um so england and wales data um this is england the world’s data this now this is the five years up to 2019 so the ons is quite clever here really so it’s given this figure of excess deaths here
Um the the uh that that one the 15.9 percent excess deaths um that’s based on the previous five years but of course the previous five years included 2020 and 2021 when we had a lot of covered deaths of course so these statistics take into account uh
The five year that the period of five years before that up to 2019 so they don’t include uh covered death so we see that here the deaths are even higher so 16.6 excess deaths in england and wales over pre-covered times and uh 18.2 if we just take wales on its own so
Very much higher in wales so we’ve got this excess of deaths that is not attributable to covered why are these people dying at a higher rate now first thing to look at is where the deaths are occurring um now most of them are occurring at home so um 31.5 of these
Above the five-year rate 31.5 above the five-year average simply people dying at home hospitals twelve point one percent other care homes ten point three percent above above five-year averages other settings prisons etc 10.1 percent so we see especially at home a lot more people are dying in all of these situations
Than we would expect and most of this is not attributable to covered so what is going on well um some experts have put together a few ideas and i put i’ve added these with a few of my own so quite a few health experts are calling for an urgent investigation
Which of course i would uh i would call for that as well we need to find out what’s going on here pandemic response is probably part of the reason the effects that we took to control the pandemic in themselves would have caused some excess deaths there’s no question about that ironic
Uh but probably going to be ongoing for some time and we’ll look at some examples of that now so stress is certainly a factor human beings relieve their stress quite often um if i’m stressed i’ll try and go for what we want to amaze or something like that or
You know human human beings reduce their stress a lot by talking to each other and by touching each other and of course that wasn’t possible for periods of time this can have knock-on effects that is for sure reduced physical activity i’m not so sure about that during the first and second proper
Lockdown periods i saw more people walking outside my house than i’ve seen for years so um you know in family groups which were allowed to do household groups so is that true i don’t think we’ve got any firm data on that but it’s a possibility lack of access to healthcare is probably
The biggest one there’s going to be an excess death particularly of cancers and other conditions that is definitely a big factor people were unable to access healthcare for fear or for whatever reason it was people didn’t access healthcare as they normally would therefore diagnoses were delayed and treatments are delayed and that’s going
To have especially if you think something like cancer that’s certainly going to have a significant effect in increasing deaths delayed referrals for diagnosis and treatment both of those still a big waiting list at the moment specialists are very uh concerned rightly about getting the waiting list down but of course more
People are coming in all the time um which which is is a problem um we we are well behind treatments that should be getting given now are not being given now and this is causing some deaths cost of living crisis um is definitely there um now or i’m not an
Economist but clearly clearly the uh the factors all of the lockdown costs the covert costs are massive government spending was some might say in judicious then we’ve got the effects of the tragic war going on in in eastern europe the ukraine situation all of these things are contributing to real increase
In cost of living causing stress dietary change and difficulties now another thing i thought about particularly was uh the effects have covered itself um people whose health was is weak and bicarbonate now we know there’s a big long covered problem is that leading to a certain amount of deaths it’s hard to
Tell could cover be affecting the immune system could it be causing other longer-term diseases possibly more data needs to come out on that for example after covered we know there’s an increased risk of stroke we know there’s an increased risk of heart attacks and probably other diseases as well
Has vaccination been causing increase in deaths we know vaccination has caused some deaths clearly we know that we know people have died after vaccination covered vaccination we know that is there an ongoing effect here is there an effect on the immune system um to tell you the truth we don’t have
We don’t have too much data to go on that governments haven’t released much data on that so it’s certainly a possibility certainly a possibility that vaccinations causing some increased deaths we know there’s increased autoimmune diseases is this due to vaccination is it due to people who’ve had covered
Both affecting the immune system of course probably partly but there again we know that autoimmune diseases have been increasing in the years prior to the pandemic the degree to which they’ve been accelerated by the pandemic we don’t really know yet more to come on that we need to find these things out
New medications used as covered treatments now i’m not going to mention particular treatments but you and i know that pharmaceutical companies have produced new treatments that they put forward as antivirals and these have been given to people they haven’t been used for very long so we don’t know what
The long-term effects of these are by definition we don’t know what the long-term effects are because we haven’t had a long time yet to find out what the long-term effects are i’m not too concerned about um that applies the same applies for vaccines of course i’m not too concerned
About the repurposed drugs such as the antibiotics such as the steroids that are used quite extensively in in severe covered because we we are very good at using steroids we know very precisely the different steroids to use we know very precisely the doses and we know very precisely the adverse effects
Because we’ve been using them for well certainly all of my career but we’ve been using them since uh since well i’ve been using them since the 70s so um they’ve probably been used they were well established when i started as well so we’ve been using these for decades we know about these
Drugs the same with the anticoagulants we know about those as well and um okay that there are side effects but we know about these and we can account for them so i don’t think that’s it but i think there is a question mark over the new treatments
Now just before we look at what the great and the good have to say about this i just want to show you a couple of interesting a couple of interesting slides here this is the first one this is the total number of deaths we see this was the peak in uh
The 1918-19 pandemic and then we see a comparable peak uh in 2021 but of course the population here was way less than the population is uh now um so that’s quite interesting to look at so but it’s better to look at it in terms of population so this is this is crude
Mortality rates and basically uh a crude way to look at crude mortality rates is is its deaths per per thousand so it’s taking into account the population size so i find this fascinating we had a peak there in 1918-19 and if you look at the size of the peak that we’ve just had
It’s much much smaller way way smaller peak that we’ve just had there once the size of the population is taken into account so 1918 19 uh 2021 also fascinating to note the reduction in death rates during the latter part of the 19th century this improvement here is largely due to
The fact that we had in greatly improved social conditionings improved housing improved nutrition the effects of drugs only came in much much later for example antibiotics only became available um well some became available in the early mid 40s to to the military um but most people in civilian life
Didn’t have access to antibiotics until about 19 late 1940s so we can see that most of the reduction had already occurred by by that time showing that the way people live is very uh is very important anyway let’s go and look at what people are saying about this now in terms of uh
People commenting oh no no actually let’s look at excess deaths in different countries first of all this is this is um different countries now this is the zero line so this is what we would expect and of course these are higher because this is in the pandemic period of time
So we would expect it to be higher so just a couple of snapshots of excess deaths there um september the 12th 2021 united states deaths 46 above average south africa 26 australia less than one percent because the uh the virus hadn’t really arrived much in australia by that time new zealand um
Actually new zealand overall is down it just happened to be up a bit that month but the point is it’s been higher than the average rule throughout the pandemic of course not surprising because of course we had a pandemic so that’s not too surprising and later on in the pandemic there’s the
Figures there so um new zealand um does have an accessor there actually now it has south africa united states united kingdom was actually below the average then of course it’s much better to look at the cumulative figures now first of all notice down here that these are around zero which you
Would expect because this is before this is before the start of the pandemic you would expect it to be round about zero then these are pandemic times here south africa high then the united states in terms of excess deaths united kingdom ireland canada australia new zealand actually on average is still slightly
Below canada now australia new zealand is slightly blown australia now has gone slightly above um the averages but these other countries well above but the point is we’re making now is that not all of these deaths can be attributed to the pandemic it’s easy to
Just say oh this is the pandemic and a lot of them were most of them were but not all of them this is the point we now have this excess deaths rate of 16 or more percent that is not attributable to covered that’s the key thing now what people
Saying about this um professor paul hunter who we’ve talked to on this channel um i think the reality is going to be quite complex but it’s something we need to be aware of and actually try and understand we need to try and work out what’s going on here
So he says there’s despair from using losing your livelihood that if that’s gone down the swanny that’s not good of course but there’s other factors as well it doesn’t have to lead to suicide chronic stress can lead to all sorts of problems so professor hunter looking at the
Socioeconomic factors there he does look at other factors as well of course that’s just an example um dr charles leveson dr a gp firm of some sort i’m not quite sure what it is a gp company i think the reasons behind these horrific numbers are complicated and none of us
Fully understand them true so that is exactly why there should be an urgent comprehensive government inquiry couldn’t agree more about that if we don’t know let’s find the heck out if anything the situation seems to be getting worse death rates seem to be increasing not due to covet
Considering the relentless focus on one virus over more than two years so government policy has basically focused on coronavirus over the last two and a bit years and let’s be quite honest about this at the expense of many of the diseases because when we had the pandemic other diseases didn’t go away
And the government is over focused it would now appear i’ve over focused on corona virus requesting answers from government on thousands and thousands of non-covered excess deaths is entirely reasonable absolutely if there’s thousands and thousands of excess deaths that are not attributable to covered we should know why
If you want a bit more on user uh on mortality figures that is an excellent guide there from the office of national statistics feel free to uh check that out so there we go um there’s an excess in deaths in the uk for sure other countries very probably
We don’t know why it is but we need to find out and on that question mark i think that’s about what we’ve got to say at the moment we will be following this of course we’ve given some suggestions but we do need some formal studies into
This let’s hope it goes away soon um but um on current trends it isn’t so we’ll keep an eye on that but in the meantime thank you for watching
