- Written by Robert Cuff
- head of statistics
The UK's coronavirus inquiry focuses on Scotland, but what do the statistics tell us about the number of deaths in each country?
Our best analysis of coronavirus deaths across the pandemic suggests that Scotland and England have been very similar.
The two countries looked completely different in the first year, but the gap narrowed in the second year.
Of course, government decisions affect differences between countries.
But so do the age and health of the population, its connections to other parts of the world, and many other factors.
As shown in the right-hand panel of the graph below, between the start of 2020 and June 2022, death rates rose by 3.2% in England compared to the years leading up to the pandemic.
These numbers are analysis Europe-wide data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
It compared mortality rates during the pandemic to those of the previous five years.
During the first 18 months of the pandemic, things looked very different in Scotland (shown on the left in the chat above).
However, over the entire period examined by the ONS, the economy was only slightly better off than the UK, with mortality rates 3% higher than expected.
A death rate of around 3% above average levels may sound like a small number, but it represents more than 150,000 deaths across the UK.
Wales (2.1%) and Northern Ireland (1.7%) were less badly hit.
Such disparities within the UK are miniscule compared to the differences between the UK and other countries.
It can be argued that the policies and outcomes of the various British administrations were in fact relatively similar.
Australia and New Zealand took very different approaches, making early decisions to “pull up the drawbridge”.
They confirmed that mortality rates remained below expected levels during the pandemic, as did Sweden, which initially took a more open approach.
So, are there policies or other factors?
In the first year of the pandemic, Sweden's mortality rate was much worse than its Nordic neighbors.
But throughout the pandemic, it was very similar to countries like Norway, Finland, and Denmark. Both had lower death rates than the UK.
Geography is therefore part of the answer, along with the health and age of a country's population and government decisions.
At the start of 2020, would any country in the UK be as isolated as New Zealand?
Or did the Swedish response play out similarly in Britain, where the climate, population density, culture and health care are vastly different?
Naturally, the research will focus on differences in decision-making between the UK nations.
But at least in terms of coronavirus deaths, these differences may not be as significant as the lessons the UK as a whole has learned from the survey.
