Last year in the UK there were nearly 40,000 excess deaths – that is, deaths above a five-year average.
In the last two weeks of 2022, deaths were a fifth higher than the average from 2016 to 2019 (the last pre-pandemic year), and that’s taking into account factors such as a bigger, ageing population.
According to the Office for National Statistics, there have been about 170,000 excess deaths in England and Wales since the pandemic began. Most of these can be directly attributed to Covid-19 itself: after all, the virus’s name is scrawled on the death certificates of more than 212,000 UK citizens. Some of those who died may have been vulnerable or infirm, but in other circumstances years away from death. As the pandemic waned, we could have expected excess deaths to shift to below average levels over time. This has not happened.
By the beginning of last year, the number of deaths was similar to 2019. As the actuary Stuart McDonald points out, we had been through the worst of a pandemic in which many frail members of society died, and normally mortality falls year on year, so to only equal the death toll of 2019 was already indicative of a worrying trend.
There were about 2,200 additional deaths in England associated with A&E delays in December alone. Average ambulance response times in England are now the worst on record, and more than half of patients are waiting for more than four hours at A&E for the first time since records began in 2011.
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