Updated Sunday 24th May
We have been told repeatedly by Government politicians and a few officials that comparing the impact of Covid across different countries is currently a spurious and futile endeavour. Is this really the case. Let’s have a look at the relevant numbers across Europe’s largest countries.
First, how many people died in total?
Here we use the official COVID death rate, which admittedly not the gold-standard way of assessing Covid mortality, which would be the excess deaths. I may come to that in due course, but in the meantime, here are the numbers for total deaths. At 36,393, the UK deaths are higher than any other European country. The UK has the highest number of officially recorded Covid-19 deaths.
COVID-19 total deaths selected European countries
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But what about when you consider the population size?
When normalising the total death rate by population, the UK rate has just reached the level of the Italian death rate, though is still someway below Spain, which leads with approximately 600 deaths / million inhabitants. Germany has managed to come through the pandemic with under 100 deaths / million inhabitants so far. Spain has the highest number of deaths per capita.
COVID-19 total deaths per million European countries
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How about the current death rate? Which countries are recovering faster?
While the UK followed a similar upward path as France as the epidemic took hold, and was approximately two weeks behind Italy, the decline in the number of deaths has been a lot slower in the UK. It is difficult to attribute causes by simply looking at the aggregate data, but on current trends, the reduction in UK death rate lags other European countries by three weeks.
COVID-19 daily deaths selected European countries
7 day moving average
What is the outlook? Considering new cases
Death rates are lagging indicators, reflecting infections that were acquired a number of weeks prior. In order to get a better sense of the effectiveness of the various lockdown measures, we need to consider the detection rate of new cases in a number of European countries. This is determined by dividing the number of new cases by the number of tests carried out over the same period. In this way, it provides an indication of how the numbers of infections are changing in the broader population. The absolute numbers are less important than the trends for each country. The UK new case intensity remains higher than all other European countries.
Looking Closer at the Case Detection Rate
It is difficult to elucidate trends in a decaying exponential curve. So let’s look at the same graph plotted against a logarithmic scale. Once again, not only is the UK detecting more positive cases than other European countries, but the rate of decline is much slower too. For example, since the beginning of the month, the Italian halving period for new cases is around 10 days, whereas in the UK it is approximately 15 days. The UK infection rate is declining more slowly than other European countries.
In summary, we can conclude that although the UK had the good fortune of a delayed onset of the epidemic compared to Spain and Italy, it did not put this advantage to good use. The lockdown measures appear to have been put into force too late to prevent an epidemic that was at least as bad, if not worse than any other country.