This post, authored by Nick Bowler, is republished with permission fromThe Daily Sceptic

It has been just over two years since I last wrote an article in theDaily Scepticabout excess deaths. In the meantime I have continued to compile data from the weekly ONS mortality reports in the hope that an obvious fall in excess deaths would eventually appear in the mortality statistics, but unfortunately this has not yet happened to any significant degree.

Five full years have now elapsed since the year that the first two most deadly Covid waves hit in 2020, so it is a good time to summarise where we are in terms of aggregate data gathered thus far.

The table below shows the data that I will present in this article. The upper half of the table shows the years from 2015 through 2019, which for the purposes of this article represents the baseline situation before the six-year span of the Covid years shown in the lower half of the table. The average for the 2015-2019 data appears in between the lower and upper halves of the table.

The figures have been totalled for each year and ‘smoothed’ to account for the fact that 2015 and 2020 were both 53 week years statistically speaking, and so for example the five-year 2015-2019 average figures are actually for a 52.2-week elapsed period. The meanings of each column are explained in the description below the table itself.

Column 1 shows the total deaths for each year for all respiratory disease (ARD) for the years from 2015 through 2025. Note that this is deaths ‘due to’ respiratory disease as reported weekly by the ONS, as opposed to deaths ‘with’ respiratory disease where the cause of death was something else and respiratory disease was just a comorbidity at the time of death and thus not the direct cause of death. The lower half of the table includes deaths ‘due to’ Covid in ARD as well as all the other respiratory diseases.

It is obvious that, particularly in 2020 but also to a lesser extent in 2021, there were very high numbers of deaths from ARD. Column 4 shows the excess figures relative to the baseline. However the situation was normalising already in 2022 and 2023, and had completely returned to baseline levels again through 2024 and 2025. Bear in mind that several recent studies have appeared that cast doubt on the numbers of deaths ascribed to Covid, particularly in the early phases of the pandemic, so it is possible that the ARD situation normalised even more quickly than appears from the table.

Deaths due to Covid have fallen from a high of over 80,000 in 2020 to just under 3,000 reported in 2025 (out of 71,000 of total ARD), so any artificial inflation of the Covid numbers would now be little noticed in the total figure anyway. Column 14 shows the actual deaths due to Covid in each year just for reference purposes.

Column 2 shows the total deaths for all cause mortality (ACM) for each year. Again 2020 and 2021 were the worst years in this regard, however every year since 2020 also had significantly higher excess death than the pre-Covid baseline (see column 5), and the total cumulative excess since 2019 now stands at just under 300,000.

Column 3 shows the total deaths for non-respiratory mortality (NRM) for each year. This figure encompasses deaths from all other causes than respiratory disease, so it is calculated by subtracting column 1 from column 2. The figure for 2020 is within normal baseline values, and although in 2021 it does rise slightly, it is not until 2022 and each subsequent year thereafter where we can see the significant and sustained rise in the level of this figure over baseline. Columns 6 and 7 show the excess over baseline expressed in absolute numbers and as a percentage respectively.

Source: modernity