SG Talk

24 Jan, 2023 20:59


Nearly 3,000 more Britons are dying than average on a weekly basis, and it’s not Covid-19 that’s responsible.

Troubled by national statistics showing 20% excess deaths per week, UK MPs have demanded an investigation

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Unlike the last time excess deaths reached such levels, during the second Covid-19 wave, few of these deaths could be attributed to the virus.

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2,837 more people died in the second week of January than normal in England and Wales, with just 5% of those deaths being attributable to Covid-19.

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Nor is the statistic an outlier – the last two weeks of December saw 21% and 20% excess deaths.

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500 people a week are dying because they cannot receive emergency treatment in time. A record 54,532 people waited more than 12 hours in emergency departments


https://www.rt.com/news/570436-uk-excess...ation-mps/

By Robert Cuffe & Rachel Schraer
BBC News

More than 650,000 deaths were registered in the UK in 2022 - 9% more than 2019.

This represents one of the largest excess death levels outside the pandemic in 50 years.

Though far below peak pandemic levels, it has prompted questions about why more people are still dying than normal.

Data indicates pandemic effects on health and NHS pressures are among the leading explanations.


https://www.bbc.com/news/health-64209221

Britain’s excess death rate is at a disastrous high – and the causes go far beyond Covid

Sun 15 Jan 2023 14.09 GMT


A deadly, avoidable crisis is under way, fuelled by NHS cuts, the neglect of social care, inequality and the soaring cost of living

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tens of thousands of bodies avoidably piling up in the nation’s mortuaries? One funeral home worker says that they’ve run out of spaces for the deceased and “are having to keep some encoffined in office rooms”; another hospital porter reports that the mortuary has been near capacity for two weeks.

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Last year in the UK there were nearly 40,000 excess deaths – that is, deaths above a five-year average. That’s nearly as many as were killed by the Luftwaffe in the blitz. In the last two weeks of 2022, deaths were a fifth higher than the average from 2016 to 2019 (the last pre-pandemic year), and that’s taking into account factors such as a bigger, ageing population.

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there have been about 170,000 excess deaths in England and Wales since the pandemic began. Most of these can be directly attributed to Covid-19 itself: after all, the virus’s name is scrawled on the death certificates of more than 212,000 UK citizens.

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As the pandemic waned, we could have expected excess deaths to shift to below average levels over time. This has not happened.

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higher death rates among relatively young adults, and as spring came, more dying than in 2019. And here’s the thing: while the dreadful Covid death toll continues to mount, many of these excess deaths are driven by other factors.

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One, the crisis in our NHS. There were about 2,200 additional deaths in England associated with A&E delays in December alone.

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former health secretary Jeremy Hunt’s confession that he was partly to blame for an NHS staffing crisis that left Britain more vulnerable to the pandemic and its after-effects. Consider the impact on retention and recruitment of the Tories’ scrapping of the nurses’ bursary, and the fact that nurses have lost, on average, £5,000 a year in real terms pay since 2010: there are about 50,000 vacancies in England.

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There is also a more structural factor at play. Our society is defined by inequality, and poverty breeds poor health: conditions such as obesity, high blood pressure, respiratory disease, even cancer. So what happens if you throw a pandemic at an under-resourced healthcare system, in a profoundly unequal society ravaged by poor health?

What if you add a cost-of-living crisis which ...... leads vulnerable people to fear turning on their heating in cold snaps such as the one we endured in early December? What if you also have a government that has spent years obliterating the public health budget, which is intended to promote healthy lives and prevent illnesses that impose pressures on the NHS?

This is the British tragedy: a country left exposed to disaster because of the fatal conjoining of a broken economic system and an ideologically crazed government. This is a humanitarian crisis

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But as those bodies pile up in our mortuaries and funeral homes, remember this – it was all avoidable.


https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...-of-living