Last year was the deadliest in a century, with almost as many fatalities documented in absolute terms in England and Wales in 2020 as at the height of the flu pandemic in 1918.
More than 608,000 deaths were recorded in the calendar year, with 81,653 attributable to coronavirus, according to new figures released by the Office for National Statistics. The toll pushes deaths to the highest in a century, second only to the all-time record of 611,861, in the worst year of the flu pandemic.
Excess deaths, the number of fatalities above the five-year average, rose to almost 91,000 across the UK in 2020 – the highest on record since the second world war.
The latest data also shows Covid deaths have returned to levels not seen since the first wave. Almost one-third of all deaths registered in the week to 1 January had Covid recorded on the death certificate, the highest proportion of coronavirus deaths since the week ending 1 May.
“When considering recorded UK deaths against other countries, the UK is performing very badly with a death rate of 1,201 per million population. This is the ninth worst death rate in the world, ahead of even the US [1,130 deaths per million],” said Dr Michael Head, senior research fellow in global health at the University of Southampton.
Belgium, Italy, the Czech Republic and Slovenia are among the countries with worse Covid death rates than the UK; the US as a whole, France and Spain are among those with lower death rates than the UK at present.
April was the deadliest month for the virus in the UK in 2020, with more than 33,000 fatalities – almost a third of the deaths in the country attributed to the virus to date. More than 1,000 people died in the UK on 23 consecutive days during the month, according to death certificate data, at the height of the pandemic’s first wave.
The figures come as the UK is set to record 100,000 coronavirus deaths in the coming days, according to data analysed by the Guardian.
There have been 93,030 coronavirus deaths recorded by statistical agencies based on deaths with Covid on the death certificate to the first days of January, and a further 5,349 deaths since, according to figures published by the government based on deaths within 28 days of a positive test for the virus, making a total of 98,379 Covid-related deaths so far.
Head said the UK’s death toll reflects on the way the pandemic has been handled. “Public compliance with the guidance has mostly been good, so this is predominantly a failure of governance. Aspects include delayed decision-making when considering lockdowns, an expensive and flawed roll-out of the test-and-trace programme, a lack of support to help people self-isolate, a border policy for international arrivals that is extremely lax, and policies that encouraged mixing indoors such as the ‘eat out to help out’ scheme. Any inquiry into the UK government handling of the Covid-19 pandemic will find there is a lot to scrutinise.”
The death toll is second in absolute terms to the record set in 1918, when 611,861 people died at the peak of the flu pandemic in England and Wales. However, the crude mortality rate was 1,798 per 100,000 people in 1918, when approximately 38.4 million people lived in England and Wales, compared to a rate of 1,016 last year.
