The Financial Times is attempting to pull together the numbers necessary to judge upon national reactions to and policies about the coronavirus. In the course of which we get this:
The UK has suffered the highest rate of deaths from the coronavirus pandemic among countries that produce comparable data, according to excess mortality figures.
The UK has registered 59,537 more deaths than usual since the week ending March 20, indicating that the virus has directly or indirectly killed 891 people per million.
They are comparing excess deaths - the deviation from the norm expected at this time of year. Thus this includes those killed by Covid-19 and also those killed by the health service - in any place - essentially being closed to anything not Covid-19. As they say it’s the best approach - although we ourselves make no claim for their specific numbers - to get a handle on the overall effectiveness of the battle against.
Given the information it is then necessary to try and work out why? In the case of a pandemic the first place to look, we submit, would be at the health care system. Either and at the delivery of health care itself or the system supposedly preparing for public health and pandemics. That second would be Public Health England and we’ve not heard much either from them or about their performance here.
But rather more importantly, Britain is unique in its delivery of health care. No one else has anything quite like the National Health Service - this being something we are told so repeatedly that it has become the national religion. OK, so suppose it is, unique and entirely different. This evidence of it performing worse than any other system would be good reason to think through whether we actually want to have a system so unique, wouldn’t it?
What we think absolutely fascinating is that even if the FT is correct, that the British outcome has been worse for some reason, the one that absolutely won’t be examined is whether the NHS, by its design, made that be so. It’s a religious matter, d’ye see, not one subject to evidence or examination.