LONDON – England has had the highest excess death rate of any country in Europe during the coronavirus pandemic, with an increase that lasted longer and spread to more places than in affected countries such as Italy and Spain, according to a published government report. Thursday.
The findings, in a report by Britain’s Bureau of National Statistics, painted a grim picture of how Britain, and England in particular, withstood the first wave of the pandemic. They came when Prime Minister Boris Johnson highlighted the struggles of other countries to control new infections by moving more of them into travel quarantine.
Critics said Johnson was trying to divert attention from his own initial delaying response to the pandemic, which they say had left the country as vulnerable to a revival as its neighbors.
When the death toll from the virus in Britain first surpassed that of other European countries in May, Johnson argued that comparisons across countries were difficult because governments collected and analyzed the data differently.
But the statistical office said it avoided those difficulties by examining death rates across Europe from all causes, not just those attributed to Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, from January to June, and then compared them to the average figures from 2015 to 2019.
That takes into account Covid-19 deaths that were not labeled as such, and deaths indirectly related to the pandemic, such as those from lack of access to hospitals during lockdowns. Demographers believe that monitoring excess mortality is the most accurate indicator of deaths during the pandemic.
There are some important holes in the data, including the lack of statistics for Germany, the most populous country in Western Europe and one that has performed better than most in reducing infections and deaths.
The report also does not provide a gross number of excess deaths for each country, but a relative measure of the death rate above the historical average, adjusted for factors such as age differences.
The statistical office separately estimated that the UK suffered 55,763 excess deaths from March 14, when the virus began circulating in the country, until July 17. A New York Times analysis puts excess deaths in Britain at 62,600 over the same period, by far. the most in Europe and a 31 percent increase in mortality for that time of year.
The British report confirms the heartbreaking images of hospitals overwhelmed in Italy and Spain in March and April. At its peak, deaths in parts of Spain and Italy increased much more than anywhere else in Britain, reaching 9½ times the usual rate in mid-March in Bergamo, northern Italy, an early epicenter.
In England, where local increases were not as pronounced, the largest jump was 4½ times more normal in mid-April in Brent, a borough of London. Birmingham had the highest peak for a large British city, at 3½ times the average in recent years.
But the death rate in Britain as a whole rose higher than in Spain or Italy, and the increase spread to all corners of the country.
“Excess mortality spread geographically across the UK during the pandemic, while it was more geographically localized in most Western European countries,” said Edward Morgan, an expert in health and life event analysis at the Office of National Statistics.
For most European countries, the death rate shot up in late March and early April. During the last week of March, the worst in Europe with 33,000 excess deaths, Spain alone recorded more than 12,500 more deaths than expected compared to data from 2016 to 2019, and Italy more than 6,500 more, according to a second study, made by the French. national statistical agency INSEE.
In total, Italy has reported 35,129 deaths from Covid-19 and Spain has reported 28,441, but the Times analysis places excess deaths at more than 44,000 in each of those countries.
The British report focused primarily on England rather than the whole of the United Kingdom because, it said, the governments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland administer their own health policies, often with different results. England, most of Britain, has seen much more pronounced increases in death rates during the pandemic than others.
Public health experts have blamed Britain’s high cost in part at the time of Mr. Johnson’s closure, which occurred a week after those in Italy and Spain. The government abandoned a massive testing and contact tracking program in early March, depriving it of data on how fast the virus had circulated in the population.
Mr. Johnson’s messages may have played an unintended role. Concerned about the overflow of the National Health Service, as hospitals in Italy had been, the Prime Minister urged people to “stay home” and “protect the NHS”
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The British public took it very seriously and hospitals coped well with the avalanche of patients, one of the few bright spots in the pandemic. But experts said some sick people who should have gone to the hospital stayed home, and at least some of them died of cancer, heart disease or other illnesses.
“‘Protecting the NHS’ was interpreted as ‘Stay away from the NHS,'” said Devi Sridhar, president of the University of Edinburgh’s global public health program.
That could help explain one of the intriguing disparities in the report, he said. It showed that in London, which was badly affected by the virus, there was little difference in the excess death rate for people over 65 and those under 65.
In Madrid and Barcelona, on the contrary, there was a great disparity between those over 65 and the rest of the population, which is consistent with a disease that is more lethal for the elderly. Manchester and Birmingham also showed an age disparity, although somewhat less pronounced.
Professor Sridhar argued that England should adopt a policy of reducing new infections to zero, similar to that of the Scottish government. With such a policy, he said, it would make sense for the government to screen incoming travelers and impose strict quarantines when necessary.
“Otherwise,” he said, “given the high level of cases in the community, it could be seen as a priority for a second wave in Europe.”
Last weekend, British officials added Spain to a list of countries from which travelers have to isolate themselves for 14 days. They are now monitoring France, Belgium and Croatia, where there have been new outbreaks. Johnson said he was determined to stop a second wave of infections imported by British tourists.
The rapidly changing policy has wreaked havoc on the vacation plans of thousands of people and has been criticized by the Spanish government and has marked tourism companies.
“We think it is a huge departure from the government’s failure to handle this in a more sensible way,” said Steven Freudmann, president of the Travel and Tourism Institute, an industry lobby group. “The risk is actually higher at home than in many of these countries.”
Elian Peltier contributed reporting.
