Itsallaguess wrote:Reading these Covid-related boards over the past couple of years, no-one could be blamed for coming away thinking that the UK had a uniquely bad outcome from the pandemic, and the above WHO excess-deaths table shows that to not be the case when compared to the US and some of our large European neighbours...
I very much suspect that we'd have heard a lot more about the above ranking on these boards if the UK had been higher up on it...
I'd take these kinds of thing with a bit of a pinch of salt - if you look at the error bars on these kinds of things they're rather bigger than some of the effects you are looking for. And they've made a rather arbitrary decision to model the baseline with a cyclic cubic spline which seems to have had the effect of making Germany look worse and Sweden quite a lot better. I look forward to the Telegraph discussion of whether spline fitting is the right choice before they make any leaps to simplistic political conclusions...
I don't think anyone is saying the UK has been uniquely bad, but it's still possible for the UK to have been quite crap, particularly in 2020, and for other European countries to have made a lot of mistakes as well. Indeed, the outcome in some of the Pacific countries suggests that in general the response of most of Europe has been sub-optimal.
An interesting one that people don't talk much about here is Canada, which has seen everything from Australia-style tight exclusion in the Atlantic provinces to "let it rip" in the western provinces, and an incompetent populist reacting a month late to everything in Ontario. I leave you to decide which is closest to the UK... Their death rates have ranged from 5-18% of UK levels in the Maritimes, up to 50% in Manitoba. However the "leader" at 60% is Quebec, which has done a lot of things right and wasn't too bad for much of the pandemic, but has been really slammed by omicron - more deaths in 4 months this year than in the whole of 2021. I've not really seen an analysis of what's been going on there, it could be that even if you do most things right, if things are bad enough in your neighbours then they will spill over, particularly when you have a variant as infectious as omicron and everywhere is opening up again "because it's over".