
Our government, and its PR machine, the mainstream media, have got the covid death caldron nicely on the boil. “Double, double toil and trouble; Fire, burn; and, caldron, bubble… Eye of newt, and toe of frog, Wool of bat, and tongue of dog…Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.” At first glance, the recent daily covid death counts are alarming, but are the reported covid counts real? Is there a worrying excess in all deaths, or just a normal seasonal rise? The answers to these question are most readily found by looking at all cause mortality. Although all cause mortality is coarse grained — in truth it has no grain, it is just a single count of all deaths — it nonetheless has one cardinal virtue that comes about precisely because it doesn’t try to be too clever, it is robust. The diagnosis of death is rarely got wrong, and the UK has a reliable system of death registration. We know how many people have died overall, and when and where they died.