CCP Virus Caused More UK Deaths Than Any Infectious Disease in a Century: Report

A doctor wearing protective equipment is seen unloading a patient outside St Thomas' Hospital, in London on April 7, 2020. Peter Summers/Getty Images

The CCP virus pandemic in the UK has caused more deaths in a year than any other infectious disease for more than a century, according to official data.

The report from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) was published almost exactly one year after the government announced the first restrictions as the first wave of the Chinese Communist Party  (CCP) virus began to spread.

“More than 140,000 people have now died in the UK with COVID-19 mentioned as the underlying cause or a contributory cause on their death certificates,” the ONS report states.

“This includes more than 73,500 people in England and Wales whose deaths were due to COVID-19—where it was the underlying cause—registered in 2020.”

ONS

The report stated that “this means COVID-19 was the underlying cause of more deaths in 2020 than any other infectious and parasitic diseases had caused in any year since 1918.”

The report comes as deaths dropped to their lowest daily toll for five months.

The ONS report also includes information on working patterns and shows a sharp decline in work last year in many sectors.

According to the report: “Accommodation and food services industries, which included people furloughed from closed pubs, hotels and restaurants, recorded a 54 percent fall in average weekly hours worked in April to June 2020, with 13.0 hours per worker on average compared with 28.4 in the same three months of 2019. Other industries saw less significant falls.”

Job vacancies in nearly all sectors plummeted over the year, although they show signs of recovery.

The report, titled “Coronavirus: a year like no other”, also picks out another anomaly: house prices and the economy. Normally, house prices and the economy rise and fall somewhat in lockstep. Last year, as the pandemic hit, house prices rose, while the economy sank.

ONS

CCP virus infection rates in the UK have been falling since they peaked around the start of January, according to official statistics.

The latest infection survey, published last week by the ONS, shows that around 1 in 270 people in England had the virus in the first week of March.

The decline in infections has been slowing in the last couple of weeks, according to that particular study. However, a more up-to-the-minute survey—the ZOE Symptom Survey—suggests that rates have been falling again for around two weeks after almost leveling off at the end of February.

The ZOE survey tracks infections by using real-time data recorded by participants on their smartphones and has typically foreshadowed the results of swab test surveys that follow a week or so later.

“The drop in new cases continues with only 5089 a day positive, and with over a million PCR and LFD [lateral flow device] tests per day performed around 2000 may even be false positives,” Tim Spector, who runs the survey, wrote on Twitter on March 13.

“Now with vaccine effectiveness kicking in, these are one of lowest levels in Europe and low admissions and deaths.”