If you think you know how many Britons died during the pandemic, think again

The Covid Inquiry has started its work, as new evidence is published that the UK wasn’t among the worst performers

All those who are sure Boris Johnson disastrously mismanaged the virus need to think again (AFP via Getty)

I can exclusively reveal that the public inquiry into the UK’s coronavirus response will satisfy no one. Anyone with an opinion has already decided the pandemic was handled badly and they know who to blame. It is a whitewash before it has even started.

We have been here before. The Chilcot inquiry into Iraq managed to avoid being accused of being a stitch-up only by taking so long and by burying its finding that Tony Blair had not set out to deceive. No wonder Baroness Hallett, the chair of the Covid inquiry, will wait until next year before she starts her public hearings.

The government published her draft terms of reference yesterday, and she wrote an open letter to the public setting out her initial timetable.

She has already been accused of being part of a government plan of delay. Afzal Khan, the shadow justice minister, said: “We feared all along that the government were trying to kick the inquiry into the long grass to hide their mistakes, and here we are.” He knows already that mistakes were made, and by whom. The purpose of an inquiry would seem to be to prove him right.

But all those who are sure that Boris Johnson disastrously mismanaged the virus, leading to the worst death toll in Europe, an accusation routinely made by Labour against the government, should look at a study published by The Lancet, the medical journal, on Thursday.

It estimates excess deaths in 191 countries in the first two years of the pandemic, 2020 and 2021 – that is, the number of people who died who would not have been expected to die in an average year before coronavirus. As Professor Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, said at a news briefing early on in the pandemic, when journalists were suggesting that we were doing badly compared to other countries, excess deaths, or “all-cause mortality”, is the most reliable way of comparing outcomes between countries.

That is because different countries record deaths from Covid in different ways, and there is often an element of doubt about whether Covid was the cause of death. The Lancet found that the UK tends to attribute more deaths to Covid than other countries. The best way to strip out these problems of definition is to look at excess deaths. There are still problems – The Lancet tries to adjust for other events, such as heatwaves, that caused significant extra deaths – but the figure for excess deaths is better than any other.

These are difficult numbers to compile and check, which was why Professor Whitty was suggesting it would be some time, even after the main waves of infection were past, before fair comparisons between countries could be made. But now the Lancet authors (all 96 of them) have done the work and the 2020-21 results are in.

The Lancet study shows the UK had slightly more excess deaths during those two years than the global average: 127 per 100,000 people compared with 120.

Compared with other western European countries, we had a lower rate than Italy (227), Portugal (202), Spain (187), Belgium (147) and the Netherlands (140). Our rate was about the same as France (124) and Germany (121), and higher than the Scandinavian countries (Sweden was 91) and Ireland (just 13). Our rate was lower than that of the US (179). A few countries – including Australia, New Zealand and Iceland – recorded negative excess deaths, that is fewer deaths than would have been expected.

These figures are a useful baseline for the Covid inquiry, and they put into perspective some of the self-hating narrative of the past two years. In David Remnick’s immortal words in The New Yorker, England is “the one country where ... the people feel schadenfreude toward themselves”.

When that tendency is combined with fierce partisanship, it is no wonder that so many people in England – and it is different in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, although the excess death rates are not – have convinced themselves that Boris Johnson is uniquely incompetent.

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No doubt he could have done better, but he has two cast-iron defences when Lady Hallett comes calling. One is that he followed the advice of the government’s scientific advisers. This was especially true in the first wave, when “everybody knows” that the government acted too slowly.

If that is true, and it may be, then it wasn’t Johnson’s fault. In later waves there were undoubtedly differences of emphasis between ministers and scientists – in late 2020 the scientists may have been right; in late 2021 the ministers probably were – but at no point did professors Sir Chris and Sir Patrick disagree explicitly with government policy in public, still less did they resign.

The other thing the Lancet figures should tell us is that we still know little about why some countries were worse affected than others. The certainty and conviction of those who have acted as prosecution, judge and jury in the case against the prime minister are at odds with the uncertainty and unknowability of the science – let alone of the assessors of the social and economic costs of the pandemic. Let us hope that Lady Hallett is given the time to come to considered conclusions on these difficult questions.