What's driving excess death in Scotland? Spoiler alert: it's not Covid.
A large number of people in Scotland this year have not died from the sorts of things they usually do. And a growing number are dying from things that they didn’t used to.
EXCESS MORTALITY is a term used in epidemiology and public health that refers to the number of deaths above and beyond what we would have expected to see under ‘normal’ conditions. When excess mortality is positive, more people have died than usual. When it’s negative, fewer people have died.
According to official mortality statistics, a surprisingly large number of people in Scotland have apparently not died this year from the sorts of things they usually do (there has been “negative excess mortality” for a number of major causes of death). And a worryingly large number of people are now dying of things that they didn’t used to die of that aren’t Covid. This tell us a lot about Covid hysteria, and about the harms its policies are causing.
The National Records Of Scotland publishes a weekly summary of all deaths in Scotland, categorised by major cause and location of death. I’d encourage you to download the spreadsheet and look at Table 3 (2021), which shows death by cause of and location, both for 2021 and for the average of the years 2015-2019.1 It’s comprehensive.
To justify its outlandish and authoritarian Covid policies, Scotland’s regional government regularly weaponises these data in its ongoing operation to misinform the public by overstating the significance of Covid.
Naïve analysis of government data — which is to say, the analysis presented to the public via its client media — reveals that deaths in 2021 have exceeded their 5 year average for much of the year. After 18 months of deliberately heightening fear and hysteria to boost compliance with its schemes, the regional government can now safely rely on the majority of the public assuming that the excess is caused by Covid:
Scratch the surface, however, and all is not as it seems. For a start, let’s separate out Covid from cancer, heart disease, stroke, dementia, respiratory and other diseases:
At the start of the year, despite Covid policy’s very significant reduction in the availability of medical treatment for non-Covid diseases, fewer people than normal apparently died of non-Covid diseases. This is astonishing. Either our hospitals have for years been killing people instead of curing them, or something else is going on.
Since the summer, however, more people than normal are dying of non-Covid diseases than of Covid. To be fair, Covid is not now a significant cause of death relative to other causes. The current daily excess death rate due to Covid — 20 per day, in a population of 5.4 million — is only half the daily death rate due to cancer alone. But the First Minister’s Covid fear-stoking propaganda omits this most basic fact about the reality of death in Scotland.
But it’s not until we inspect death by cause and location that we see what’s really going on in Scotland:
First, look at respiratory disease. Significantly fewer people than normal have apparently died of non-Covid respiratory disease in Scottish hospital and care homes this year, with the greatest reduction occurring at the peak of the winter seasonal respiratory infection period. Has there been a miracle in the treatment of non-Covid respiratory disease in the last 18 months? That seems unlikely. They are simply missing from the records.
Then look at deaths in care homes from all causes. Significantly fewer people than normal are dying in them of respiratory illness, dementia, Alzheimers, cancer, heart disease, and stroke. Has there been a revolution in the treatment of geriatric illnesses in care homes in the last 18 months? That also seems unlikely. Again, they are simply missing from the records.
Then look at cancer, heart disease, and stroke. Overall, excess death across the different locations has increased. And significantly fewer are dying in hospitals where they would have had the possibility of treatment. They die now at home, away from the bright lights of the client media.
Lastly, look at ‘other’ causes. There is now a permanent increase in excess death from a wide range of causes that include drug overdosing, alcoholism, violence, and all the other pathologies of Covid policy-induced despair. And the majority of their victims are also dying at home.
These data reveal three problems with the Covid narrative in Scotland and, by extension, in the UK.
Firstly, let’s suppose that the ‘missing’ respiratory infection deaths are people who, in a normal year, would have died of respiratory infection, but who this year have died instead of Covid. Let’s further suppose that the ‘missing’ deaths in care homes — dementia, Alzheimers, cancer, heart disease, and stroke — are also people who would have died in a normal year of those diseases, but have died instead of Covid. Then a more accurate measure of the true significance of Covid is obtained by restoring those ‘missing’ deaths. We can achieve this by adding back the ‘missing’ deaths, and reducing the number of deaths attributed to Covid by the corresponding amount. That produces this alternative view of the impact in Scotland on excess death of Covid and its policies:
Secondly, in an effort to ‘protect the NHS’ — that is to say, to relieve it of the responsibility of protecting us — thousands have been denied hospital treatment. This has been compounded by what is, in effect, ‘work-to-rule’ by increasingly recalcitrant GPs for whom Covid has presented a golden opportunity to reduce their NHS working commitments and enhance their leisure time and private practice revenues.
Put these together — the ‘missing’ non-Covid deaths, a health system that has cynically abandoned its purpose, and a regional government that has deliberately inflicted isolation, loneliness, and despair on the citizens it was elected to serve — and it’s straightforward to see who and what is currently causing excess death in Scotland.
It’s not Covid.
Echoing the situation in Sweden, after allowing for negative Respiratory and Care Home excess death, Covid has had no net impact on excess death in Scotland in 2021. Excess death has increased, but the increase is due to increased death rates from cancer, heart disease, stroke, and the illnesses of despair— illnesses largely affecting younger people who are generally not affected by Covid. Those deaths have increased because GPs have stopped seeing us, and hospitals have stopped treating us. And because hospitals have stopped treating us, we’re quietly dying at home, hidden away from the cameras, bright lights, and propaganda.
Because of a disease that now has no direct impact on excess death, we’re continuing to allow the regional government to impoverish the poorest in our society, to burden us with untreated diseases, to blight our economy and destroy our livelihoods, to irretrievably harm the education of an entire generation of our children, to expose us to experimental gene therapies with unexamined, potentially nightmarish side effects, and to deprive us of freedoms that were never theirs to take.
In Australia, a country that used to ‘believe in a world order that favours freedom and that supports the dignity and free expression of all people’, citizens are now facing sinister, black-clad paramilitary police indiscriminately firing hails of rubber bullets into crowds and pepper spraying elderly women in the face at close range to ‘protect their safety’. Scotland is pressing ahead with so-called ‘vaccine passports’ to facilitate the bio-surveillance of its citizens and exclusion from society of healthy people waiting for the outcome of safety trials of increasingly ineffective and alarming experimental medicines.
How much longer are we prepared to tolerate these authoritarian, pseudoscientific policies in the face of such starkly clear evidence about the extent to which they are killing people?
Edinburgh, September 2021.
“Excess” death may be an unfamiliar term. In any given period, there is a “normal” death rate, taken to be the average of deaths in that period. “Excess” deaths deaths that are higher (or lower) than that average. Positive excess deaths mean more people than usual have died. Negative death means fewer have. In this essay, we use National Records of Scotland data for average deaths in the period 2015-2019 to compute excess death. All data and processing scripts can be found at https://github.com/richardjlyon/scotland-excess-death.
Reposted