Quote Originally Posted by kritichris View Post
Whether it's covid or something else there's been an extraordinary number of excess deaths in the last 12 months. Perhaps there's a Conservative hit squad trying to reduce the pension burden. 100,000 x 500 x 13 = £650 million a year saved. They just hadn't anticipated the other costs.
Certainly an increase on recent years Chris, but if you take into account the annual increase in the size and age of the population, the mortality rate in 2020 was just back to 2008 levels, and it was higher in every year back to WW2, all of which we managed without locking the country down and devastating the economy.

"On 12 January, the Head of Mortality Analysis at the Office for National Statistics revealed that mortality rate in the UK in 2020, during a civilisation-threatening pandemic necessitating our transition into a biosecurity state, had been the worst since . . . 2008. This is based on what the ONS calls its ‘age-standardised mortality rates’, which take account of both increases in population numbers and the ageing of the population, both of which increase the actual number of deaths. This shows that the age-standardised mortality rate in 2020 of 1,043.5 deaths per 100,000 of the population was surpassed not only in 2008 (with 1,091.9 deaths per 100,000), but also in 2007 (1,091.8), in 2006 (1,104.3), in 2005 (1,043.8), 2004 (1,163.0), 2003 (1,232.1), 2002 (1,231.3), 2001 (1,236.2) and 2000 (1,266.4). Unfortunately, the calculation of age-standardised mortality rates for England and Wales only goes back to 1942; but every year between then and 2008 had a higher mortality rate than 2020. Even by the measure of the ‘crude mortality rate’ not adjusted for an ageing population, no year before 2004 had a lower mortality rate than 2020. In fact, over the last 79 years, 2020 has the 12th lowest mortality rate."