What is driving all cause excess mortality?

The first purpose of using non pharmaceutical interventions to control the spread of an infectious disease is to ensure that the health and care system is not overwhelmed. This is critical to avoiding loss of capacity to deliver urgent life-saving treatment for all causes of avoidable mortality.

With the current surge of the omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2, we have again acted with too little control, too late. That large parts of the health and care system will be overwhelmed is now inevitable, and in this wave particularly, covid deaths may only be a lesser part of the subsequent avoidable mortality.

The levels of the population who risk exposure to coronavirus are a political choice. Despite all receiving the same advice and data from the UK Health Security Agency in late autumn 2021, England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland have made different choices about how to manage the impact of the omicron variant. Fewer controls implemented …