According to the government, there have now been 126,000 deaths from Covid in the UK. But according to the Office for National Statistics, the true total is now over 150,000.

It is extraordinary that such a death toll should receive so little coverage in the media. And perhaps even more extraordinary that there is so little public outcry about it.

Possibly one of the main reasons for this is that the government’s claim that “we did everything we could” has been accepted.

But, if it is true that this government has done its best, it is also worth looking at how other governments around the world have performed and asking the question, is our government’s best good enough?

We can quite easily compare the government’s claimed performance with the performance claimed by other governments around the world. The Statista database has data for 153 countries around the world. At the time of writing (05/04/2021), the UK is ranked at number 148 with a death toll per million of almost 1,900. Our government has delivered us the sixth worst performance of all governments.

In itself, this might not matter if the difference between good performance and bad performance were small. But as you can see in the graph above, it is not small. A country with a middling performance would have had fewer than 200 deaths per million throughout the entire epidemic; the UK has had 1,890.

If our government had been a middling performer – like countries such as Finland, Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia and Jamaica – even allowing for some understatement on their part as there is on ours – our total death toll would be around 14,000.

Around 135,000 of those deaths would not have happened.

It is too late for those 135,000 – and for their families and friends – but it is not too late to stop a deadly third peak costing many tens of thousands more lives.

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