So I have taken the ONS’s annual death figures for England and Wales and graphed them all the way back to the turn of the twentieth century. Then I thought: what if we presumed that the death toll for 2020 is the five-year average plus the Covid-19 numbers? This is likely to be a high estimate, as probably many of the people who died from Covid-19 would have died this year anyway, so the real annual total is not likely to be that high. But I thought, let’s see what that number would look like anyway.
(I’m presuming that lockdown has saved none or few lives, which has been shown by numerous comparisons between countries, including Sweden, which all have the same curves. Note also that there is the complication that lockdown may itself inflate the death toll for 2020, via things like delayed cancer treatments, but any such deaths should not be in my graph anyway, as they are deaths caused by the lockdown, not Covid, and I’m trying to show the effect of Covid.)
The five year average for 2015-19 is 531,355 deaths per year. As of writing this there were 42,462 Covid-19 deaths in the UK (from this site). There are likely to be a few more deaths in the next few weeks, but not many more, as the disease is (barring an unlikely second wave in winter), almost gone. Besides, the number we are adding on here is for the whole of the UK, not just England and Wales, so if anything this number is inflated. Adding the two numbers gives us an estimated 573,817 deaths for 2020. I put that into the spreadsheet and graphed the numbers back to 1900. Here is the result, with time running right to left, so the 2020 estimate is on the left-hand side. (Click to enlarge.)
So: no gigantic, bowel-emptying spike in 2020. No jaw-dropping upwards vertical spike to match those jaw-dropping downward vertical spikes we saw with the economic data. Nothing much at all, really. Ask someone in the future who was unacquainted with the era to point to where the once-in-a-century medical disaster was, and they would have no chance of picking it out.
For God’s sake, it’s not even as many as 1993, or 1989, 1986, 1985, 1983, 1982, and numerous other years.
And bear in mind that this graph IS NOT EVEN ADJUSTED FOR POPULATION GROWTH. I’m going to do that soon, and that will show a pronounced downward curve over time. 2020 won’t come anywhere near to comparing with other earlier eras. Far from being a once-in-a-century pandemic, Covid-19 turned out to be a bad flu. We shut down the world for a bad flu. We shut down the world despite living in the safest era in the whole of history.
Update: I have been spending a lot of time digging into the excess winter deaths situation, and I’ve become less convinced that it’s a useful way of looking at things (post coming soon), but it doesn’t really matter when you look at the graph above.
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31 thoughts on “This is what we screwed the world for”
Great work, Hector!
Some say that the tough part of research is asking the right question. That graph invites the real question — What has gone wrong since 2012? Forget Covid-19! Something much more significant has been happening, and it has been ignored.
For 30+ years, deaths in E+W had been declining — a decline which would become even more pronounced when adjusted for population growth over that period. Then something happened around 2012, and the trend reversed sharply.
If all the Best People are now excited about some incremental (accelerated?) deaths ascribed to Covid-19, why were they not getting excited about the undeniable major increase in deaths over the last decade? What factors caused that increase?
It has to do with increasing diabetes and obesity; it has to do with the terrible advice that PHE gives: the Eat Badly Plate;
folks are being told to load on carbs; that is how they fatten cattle:
cattle eat grass; and stay lean: visit the countryside sometime and check it out;
to fatten cattle, they go to a feeding lot; no grass; they eat corn (corn is glucose); the corn (ie glucose) is made into fat and stored in the muscle, so you get tasty steaks.
They fatten geese: by feeding them corn; (glucose); they get fatty liver (foie gras) and fatty liver is now very common in humans;
Folks eat lots of carbs: the insulin they generate from that; stores the carbs as fat.
Anyone reading this want to lose weight? Ditch the bread, the pasta, the rice, the potatoes: they are all fattening; try bacon and eggs for breakfast instead. See your weight decrease.
Thanks Hector,
Excellent, and your title says it all, but reading it merely makes me even angrier about this utter disaster. I know it’s been asked many times, but what exactly is wrong with most of these people, these infernal “experts”, the politicians, the media, the medical “profession”?
I’m no conspiracy enthusiast, but one can only view this whole thing and ask—Was this a monumental balls-up on a scale beyond belief, or do “they” really have some sort of mad master plan for us? I find both equally difficult to comprehend. Is the “Establishment really that fucking useless, or are they that fucking devious?
Heaven help us.
Great work – it must’ve taken a while to obtain and compile all the historical data! This graph alone shows that the 2020 death toll is nothing out of the ordinary. However, the population-adjusted data will likely show that the 2020 death toll is lower than multiple years within each of the last four decades. I really do believe that social media and the MSM have driven the mass hysteria about this completely mundane virus. Having said that, I’m extremely disappointed that my fellow countrymen swallowed all the hysteria and gladly accepted the removal of their everyday freedoms.
John Wilkinson: “or are they that fucking devious?”
That they changed the rules to make it possible for Covid-19 to appear on Death Certificates without any hard evidence of infection strongly suggest to me that, rather than being a moronic response to the virus, the virus was the excuse for the lockdown.
Martin,
I feel that was done initially, merely to bolster the government’s case. I reckon it was an evens bet to frighten the sheep into their pen whilst reinforcing the message that what the idiots were doing was the “right thing”. Political expediency and all that.
These people don’t act, they react.
“Events dear boy, events!”
Despite my earlier remarks, I find it almost impossible to believe that this was anything other than a, “Oh shit, PM, what do we do now?” moment.
In other circumstances, it would be funny enough for a TV comedy script,
Here, it’s a tragic travesty.
Excellent graph, Hector, and interesting for many reasons, not just for highlighting the C-19 non-event: thank you for producing it. Would it be possible to produce a version where the Y-scale begins at 450,000 or thereabouts, so as to make it easier to determine the year for various peaks and troughs? (Or supply the data for us to do it ourselves!).
John Wilkinson: “Despite my earlier remarks, I find it almost impossible to believe that this was anything other than a, “Oh shit, PM, what do we do now?” moment.”
If that were the case, why the footdragging about easing lockdown while the economy was rapidly tanking and people were becoming jobless in droves?
Why the incessant 2nd wave mantra, as if we’re being primed for another “disaster” ?
Why did almost all lockdown countries across the world use the same vocabulary to describe their reasoning and actions?
I’m afraid the sinister scenario stands more scrutiny than the incompetents one – though I wouldn’t accuse Johnson and Wankock of being competent. But who’s pulling Vallance’s strings, and why has Whitty looked increasingly uncomfortable while contradicting his early announcements?
Why does the WHO do an about turn about three times a week nowadays?
Who’s pulling their strings?
Any what’s to be gained by the string-pullers???
John,
“Establishment really that fucking useless, or are they that fucking devious?”
My working assumption is that it is incompetence and groupthink…with a good number of gleeful opportunists cheering it along. But, frankly, that’s more disturbing than the other.
I’m trying to find something positive about this disaster, although it’s difficult. But perhaps the lack of human activity, which has obviously reduced man-made CO2 emissions over several months, leading to no significant reduction in atmospheric CO2 concentrations, is a good sign that we may now dispense with Greta and her nonsense. The sky is blue, with hardly a vapour trail in sight. The birds are plentiful. The air is clear (where I am in the countryside). So some good has come from the panic.
Strangely, there’s no obvious spike in deaths from the Spanish flu in 1918. Was it also over-reported?
Also, it’s surprising there’s no apparent step-change (downwards) from the development and introduction of antibiotics.
There’s a massive spike for 1918.
Antibiotics didn’t come in overnight. It took years to develop the mass-production of them. This will be reflected in the population-adjusted graph, will will show a marked downwards curve.
Cheezilla asks, “why the footdragging?” etc.
I have to say I don’t know which way to jump on the question of balls-up or cover-up, but my feeling is that, yes, maybe Vallance and the others with “certain ambitions” did have a hand in the government’s moves, but I feel that the whole thing then got out of hand and political expediency took over. Decisions were made, the aim solely to retain the political gains they’d made after winning an 80 seat lead. The payments etc were made to buy the workers off, without any real thought as to what would happen later on.
Incredible as it may seem, I do feel it’s as simple as that.
No master plan to take over the world, just a bunch of child-like idiots blundering from one cock-up to the next, working on the pin-ball principle. Fire a ball up the table and hope it lands somewhere good.
Remember, these are human beings. Most of them young first-timers, most without any real experience of the wide world and all of them trying to climb up the greasy pole.
Anyone who thinks this lot are above the human frailties might like to re-consider that opinion.
I mean, just look at Hancock. Just take a really close look at him. I wouldn’t trust him to clean my car, let alone run the country’s fucking health “service”.
As always, great piece of further evidence highlighting the futility and stupidity of the whole approach to the spamdemic, aided and abetted by the media with its desire to keep this nonsense rolling on (a worldwide ambition BTW). The question now of course is, what happens to this information now? The media will choose to ignore it and sending it to MP’s is a waste of bloody time. Answers on a post card please
I thought the spike on the graph was for 1916 & 1917, i.e., WW1 – apologies.
Ed, I’ll put the actual figures up later.
I presume the reason why the war years don’t show the increases you’d expect is because most British soldiers died on foreign soil, so they won’t be in these tables.
@Hector, Good work, Thanks
Which is what I posted @TW at beginning of March
@Gavin
Blair’s surge in immigration – legal & illegal from ‘third world sh1tholes’
I’d guess there has been a surge in child deaths, esp <5, too
@John Wilkinson
Ask yourself "Who will benefit most from this economic destruction? Who lied about human to human transmission until it was widespread?"
One country's GDP is increasing this year. One org made them human rights ambassador for Asia-Pacific Group this year
@John Wilkinson Friday 26th June 2020 at 16:13
If I and many others were able to look at stats in February and conclude "Bad Flu, fatality rate ~0.5%, nothing to be concerned about", why did our politicians not? The West plus India closed countries, one country closed little more than a city
Yep, been saying that for months. Supercilious chinless wonder and a weak bully
Terry Jones on why the decades long decline in deaths suddenly turned around in 2012: “It has to do with increasing diabetes and obesity; it has to do with the terrible advice that PHE gives: the Eat Badly Plate;”
That certainly is a plausible explanation for the increases in deaths after 2012. But there are other potential explanations. Maybe we need to look further back in time for changes which might have had long-term consequences.
The UK had a great increase in immigration in the 1980s/90s onwards. Families quite reasonably tried to bring in their older relatives. 20 years later, perhaps those older relatives started dying off in numbers sufficient to affect the UK totals.
The great pogrom against smoking really began in the 1970s, and the number of smokers declined from the 1980s onwards. Smoking was asserted to be correlated to the occurrence of certain types of cancer — but we are now beginning to see evidence that smoking may delay the onset of Alzheimers/senility; perhaps smoking had some other long-term beneficial impacts — and the 2012 turnaround was due to the rising number of long-term non-smokers dying earlier from the loss of those benefits.
What about the long-term health effects of women taking the pill? What about the long-term health effects of consequent changes in social mores, to the extent that now the majority of young women in the UK carry Sexually Transmitted Diseases?
We human beings are very good at recognizing cause & immediate effect — not so good at recognizing cause & delayed effect.
The real point is that, in the aftermath of the Government Diet Scam and the Government Covid Scam and the Government Climate Change Scam, is any reasonable person going to believe ANYTHING that comes out of the mouths of politicians, bureaucrats, academics, or their bought-and-paid-for “scientists”?
Terry Jones nailed it with his comment about government diet advice. I am so very angry with the people who conned me into feeding my family and my elderly mother with foods designed to make them sick.
There is nothing new about healthy eating. That knowledge goes back thousands of years. Note the date of William Banting’s “Letter on Corpulence”: 1861, the year the American Civil War began.
https://archive.org/details/letteroncorpulen00bant
@John Wilkinson For me it was incompetence and fear that brought us into the lockdown. The MSM had been dripping with glee and sexing everything up. It was they and not the government that terrified everybody. And every other political party represented in parliament pressed for a harsher, earlier lockdown. Perhaps Micron threatening to stop people travelling to their French gites from the UK was the final push.
But since then, it’s been bully, harangue and terror. If they were an occupying power, rather than the government, they’d be facing war crimes trials for what they’ve done. They’re tripping on the power and I fear it will have to be taken back from them forcefully (NOT by force, I hasten to add, I’m not proposing an armed revolt!). The lockdown was a power grab. The way politicians and the police have abused these new powers reinforces this.
We can but hope that the judicial review on July 2nd (S. Dolan) will cast more light into the darker corners of our current politics.
UK Column has been pointing out for weeks that we have no longer been living in a democracy but under a government of occupation.
Note that backbenchers have had a very handsomely paid holiday for the last 14 weeks. and the currently skeletal Commons is about to “go on recess” – yet again.
Surely, Parliament should be working throughout the summer in order to catch up?
Great article. I’m beginning to get really mad now … at what has been done to this country,
@ Cheezilla
“Why does the WHO do an about turn about three times a week nowadays?
Who’s pulling their strings?
Any what’s to be gained by the string-pullers?”
Mr Eleven in Beijing is the string-puller and he is attempting to distract attention from internal threats that he personally and the CCP are facing.
I love the way the Graun breathlessly reports, seemingly every day, that there is a new record number of total cases.
Well, duh.
“Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence”… our politicians’ lifetime experience encompasses nothing but the climbing of greasy poles and when they get to the top they demonstrate a complete lack of the only quality that would justify their being there — leadership.
Perhaps in was the Great War centenary that drew attention to Spanish Flu. The planning, such as it was, envisioned another Influenza epidemic, otherwise fit people in the prime of life dropping dead in the street. That justified clearing hospitals to make room for those most likely to recover, it justified counting every suspect death as a plague death because if most deaths are then a little overcounting would be of less consequence than missing a potentially infectious case, and so on to lockdown.
I didn’t think a lockdown could last more that a few weeks, I despair to see so many still frighted. Now our masters are into this mess with no way out, they could have come clean, admitted they had panicked when the hospital were obviously not being overwhelmed, instead they persist in this disaster, and the longer it goes on the harder it is to back out, and the more they hope it will somehow be a disaster that can justify their arrogance and folly.
[Incidentally Hector, why run the graph right to left, it makes it unintuitive.]
UK population including age pyramids back to 1950 here:
https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-kingdom/1950/
Could the increase in deaths since 2012 be due to the push we’ve had on flu vaccines over this period. BMJ published an article back in march stating that flu vaccines increase likekihood of coronaviruses which can in the elderly lead to pneumonia and more often death just a thought?
https://www.bmj.com/content/368/bmj.m810/rr-0
@Nick Rose
Not quite. The Govt pressured msm to induce fear, msm willingly went with it. Govt several weeks ago admitted ‘it worked too well’
Delingpole: Gov’t wants fear of Covid-19 increased, media to play important part
@Cheezilla
Would have been better for UK if Christmas recess hadn’t ended and Govt on holiday
@Debbie
Interesting and plausible
@BiG are vaccines tested on vulnerable & old?
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