Sky News analysis has found that England is among the European countries with the highest number of "excess deaths" during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Excess deaths are calculated by subtracting the expected number of deaths in a given period (based on past mortality rates) from the total number actually recorded.

The figure helps give a truer picture of the impact of the virus than government death tolls.

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This is because some people will have died from the disease without anyone knowing they were infected, so their death will be missing from official coronavirus figures.


Deaths indirectly caused by COVID-19 will also be missing. For example, someone who dies of a heart attack because the ambulance service is overstretched and can’t get to them in time.

However, both these types of deaths are included in excess death figures.

Excess deaths in Europe are tracked by EuroMOMO, which receives weekly official mortality figures from 24 countries.

The chart above shows how mortality across Europe has varied over the last three years, with the number of excess deaths rising annually during the flu season.

The 2020 flu season was less severe than previous years, but a clear spike in the number of excess deaths can be seen in March, as the flu season ended and COVID-19 started to spread across Europe.

Sky News analysis of EuroMOMO figures suggests that 117,461 more people than expected died across the countries monitored, between the beginning of March and the middle of April.

In total 488,764 people died over those six weeks, up 32% from the 371,302 deaths expected.

While these additional deaths are not necessarily all caused by the pandemic the majority are likely to be related.

Image: Hospitals across Europe have been dealing with a surge in COVID-19 patients.

Across Europe, week 14 was the worst for excess deaths according to data available, with 64% more deaths than normal in both weeks.

To compare how many more people have died than expected in each country, EuroMOMO uses an algorithm to standardise each country's data and take into account factors such as population size and mortality patterns.

This produces a measure called a z-score, which tells us how many standard deviations the amount of deaths in each country is from the mean value of all countries.

The larger a country's z-score the higher the number of excess deaths.

Further analysis of the EuroMOMO figures shows that the three countries with the biggest peaks in excess deaths are Spain, Belgium, Italy and England.

England recorded the highest number of excess deaths anywhere in Europe for three consecutive weeks (week 14, 15 and 16).

Since week 13, the excess deaths in England has been well over 15 points above the normal average - which is the level at which EuroMOMO says there has been an extreme high excess of mortality.

England has recorded more than 40 points above the average for the last two weeks.

Although Spain, Italy and Belgium have also recorded considerably high excess of mortality, none of them have scored more than 40 points.

England has also had more excess deaths than expected compared with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

The Netherlands, France and Switzerland are among the other countries in Europe who have seen a rise in excess deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In contrast, the number of deaths in Denmark and Norway has so far remained roughly the same as would have been expected in a normal year.

This does not mean that these countries have had no coronavirus deaths.

But in these countries the deaths caused by the disease have either come from groups of people who were already likely to die in that period, or have been offset by fewer deaths from other causes.

So how do the excess death figures compare to the official COVID-19 death counts?

The chart below shows the number of excess deaths according to each country's statistical office alongside the official COVID-19 death count announced by the country's government.

Although this data is not directly comparable among countries, it shows that the difference between official COVID-19 records and excess of mortality is particularly big in countries most affected by the outbreak.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the chart shows that the UK, Spain and Italy are the three countries with the biggest discrepency between the two figures.

This suggests that in these countries thousands more people may have died as a result of the pandemic than are shown in official government COVID-19 death counts.