Coronavirus 'excess deaths': why England and Wales have been hardest hit in Europe – new study

To get through the COVID-19 pandemic, we need good information. One hugely important statistic is how many people have died from the disease in various countries. But it’s notoriously difficult to compare deaths in this way – each nation reports and counts deaths due to COVID-19 differently. A more promising approach is to measure “excess deaths”. The idea is pretty simple. You estimate how many deaths, from any cause, there would have been if there had been no pandemic. Then you count how many deaths there actually were. The difference between those numbers is the excess deaths. This is exactly what a major new study, published in Nature Medicine, has done for 21 countries.