Weekly number of excess deaths in England and Wales 2020-2022

For the week ending January 20, 2023, weekly deaths in England and Wales were above the five-year average, at 1,568 excess deaths. Excess deaths have been elevated for a number of weeks, with the excess deaths figure for the week ending January 13, 2023 the highest since February 2021. In the middle of April 2020, at the height of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic there were almost 12,000 excess deaths a week recorded in England and Wales. It was not until two months later, in the week ending June 19, 2020, that the number of deaths began to be lower than the five year average for the corresponding week.

Most deaths in a more than century in 2020

In 2020, there were over 695 thousand deaths in the United Kingdom, making that year the deadliest since 1918, at the height of the Spanish influenza pandemic. While no country was able to fully escape the devastation of COVID-19, the UK looks set to be one of the worst-affected countries. Compared to the rest of Europe, the United Kingdom has the fourth-worst death rate, at 180.92 deaths per million population, and, as of March 14, 2021 has by far the highest number of deaths at over 125 thousand.

UK winning the COVID-19 vaccination race in Europe

Among European nations ,the United Kingdom was the first to approve the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine for broad usage and started administering vaccinations on December 8, 2020. As a consequence, the United Kingdom currently has the highest COVID-19 vaccination rate in Europe, with other major countries such as France and German lagging quite far behind. The fact that the UK has some the most positive attitudes to vaccine safety in Europe is also important, with high levels of vaccine hesitancy likely to impede progress in other countries.