Coronavirus deaths: how does Britain compare with other countries? | David Spiegelhalter

It’s tempting to try to construct a league table, but we’ll have to wait months, if not years, for the true picture

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At prime minister’s questions on Wednesday, Keir Starmer said he had added up a total of 27,241 coronavirus deaths so far, leaving the UK “possibly on track to have the worst death rate in Europe”.

Is he right? Unfortunately, measuring the impact of the virus is a fiendishly complex task. It’s nothing like keeping score in a game. Starmer, as a lawyer, would know that we have to define our terms carefully. And so, assuming we want to make a comparison based on death rates, we first need to decide what a death rate is.

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