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Danny Dorling discusses recent findings from a major study of mortality across UK countries and cities, and highlights unprecedented worsening mortality among the UK’s poorest communities:

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Because of the pandemic of 2020 people are worrying about their health and the health of those around them more this year than has been the case for many years.

However, in the years immediately prior to the pandemic, the health of women in the UK, when measured using age standardized mortality rates, was hardly improving at all. For men it was only improving ever so slightly, about three times more slowly than it had improved during the 1980s and 1990s and five times more slowly than in the 2000s! In contrast to how acutely aware we are of the pandemic, most people were unaware of these changes because they were not the subject of news bulletins.

This is because slow changes in population health do not create news stories. However, it is truly shocking, as this BMJ Open paper reveals, that in poorer parts of the UK in the six years up to and including 2017, mortality rates actually rose. Outside of wartime, pandemics and epidemics, increases in mortality rates are unprecedented in the UK in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This rise in deaths has coincided with the imposition of austerity which has most harmed people in poorer cities.

In Scottish cities such as Dundee and Aberdeen, mortality rates worsened for both men and women in the years shortly after the Westminster coalition government was elected in 2010, and they continued to worsen during those years when the Conservatives were in power alone from 2015 onwards. In England too, for men in Liverpool and women across Birmingham, mortality rates rose.

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Graph source: Walsh D, McCartney G, Minton J, et al. Changing mortality trends in countries and cities of the UK: a population-based trend analysis. BMJ Open 2020;0:e038135. doi:10.1136/ bmjopen-2020-038135

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In all the most deprived areas of Scotland and Northern Ireland, combined mortality rates rose in the second decade of the twenty-first century quickly, after having improved so very quickly before. In England there was no improvement in male rates in the poorest areas, and so the gap between them and the more affluent areas widened; for females in England, however, death rates among the poorest again increased (see Figure above). Respiratory disease, cancers and what have been called ‘diseases of despair�� rose abruptly in the poorest parts of Scotland in the years immediately prior to 2017. Before 2013 there had been such great improvements.

It cannot be stressed enough that these changes were unprecedented. The 2020 pandemic is not unprecedented �� the UK has suffered many pandemics before including pandemics with similar mortality tolls in the 1950s and 1960s, and higher mortality rates for younger people then than in 2020. However, the deterioration of the health of the population in the decade before the pandemic struck meant that when it struck, we, and especially those in the poorest places, were weaker than before.

When you look at the maps of areas which suffered the most in 2020, think back to this paper and which areas had already seen mortality rates rising year on year before the arrival of any new disease into the UK.

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For a PDF of this article and a link to the original source click .

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And for the original study see:��

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In 1890, when he was still at school in Harrow, Winston Churchill wrote a poem entitled “The Influenza��. The outbreak he was describing may not have been of influenza. Several suggestions have been put forward to suggest that this was the advent in 1889 of the beta coronavirus now labelled OC43. Whether that is true or not, it was not a very good poem, perhaps because Winston was only aged 15 at the time he wrote it:

The rich, the poor, the high, the low

Alike the various symptoms know

Alike before it droop.

Winston, from a wealthy family, was especially concerned that the rich and the ‘high�� were suffering too. But he was also reflecting the widespread panic around him at the time, and the fact that there had been no similar pandemic for 42 years. When it has been that long (as you reading this may well know) it feels as if it has never happened before.

The population in 1890 was much younger than today. Nethertheless, 146 people died per million from the disease that year, 544 per million in 1891 and 531 per million in 1892. In total around twice the mortality rate suffered in 2020. Diseases spread through a population more quickly today, we have more treatments and possibly even a vaccine soon, so it is possible that there will be few deaths in 2021 and 2022 and that the overall mortality rate of 1890-1893 will remain roughly twice that of 2020.

In 2005 when writing about the 1889-93 pandemic Mark Honigsbaum suggested that: “the rapid progress of the influenza across Europe and the morbidity of leading politicians and other members of the British establishment occasioned widespread ‘dread�� and in some cases panic. This dread of influenza was fuelled by the high mortality rate in northern towns such as Sheffield, as well as by the disease’s association with pneumonia, neurasthenia, psychosis and suicide. However, the key factor was the growth of mass circulation newspapers and the way that the influenza drew on fin de siècle cultural anxieties about urbanisation and the increasing speed of modern life.�� This may sound very similar to some, the new technology of the local newspaper was as new then as social media is for us today. And, just as with COVD-19, men succumbed a little more often than women, especially older men, and even the Conservative Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury fell very ill from the disease.

Twenty-eight years later what was undoubtably influenza struck in 1918-1919. It was far worse than anything before in living memory (or since). As the writer Anthony Burgess explained when writing about his very early childhood: ‘In early 1919 my father, not yet demobilized, came on one of his regular, probably irregular, furloughs to Carisbrook Street to find both my mother and sister dead. The Spanish Influenza pandemic had struck Harpurhey. There was no doubt of the existence of a God: only the supreme being could contrive so brilliant an afterpiece to four years of unprecedented suffering and devastation. I apparently, was chuckling in my cot while my mother and sister lay dead on a bed in the same room.�� Anthony was born on 25 February 1917.

Thirty-years year on, in 1957 a new variant of influenza struck again, as deadly as COVID-19, and then again just a dozen years later in 1968/69; and then nothing that was as abrupt for almost 50 years (although there were slower new killers such as AIDS). Hundreds of thousands saw their lives cut short in the 1980s and 2010s due to austerity in those years, but spread over several years, rather than 40,000 dying in just a couple of months or so in 2020.

COVID-19 is the latest in a long string of pandemics to have swept the world. This current one may now be drawing to an end in Europe. It is far too early to know for sure, but today we have surveillance, knowledge and science as never before. However, we also have a recurrence of the dread seen in 1890 and we do not have the fortitude (or resignation) of previous times.

I’ll end this short note with a graph that two colleagues and myself published on October 1st 2020 as it gave us a little hope. You can find a detailed explanation of it in the article pointed to in the final note given below. For now, it might just help to know that in England in the days between 1 August and 18 September 2020, the number of cases of the disease did not rise in those places which had suffered worst earlier in the year. This is how outbreaks of diseases such as this begin to end. As yet this curtailing has only been observed in very few parts of England, mostly in London, but at least it has now �� finally �� begun to be observed.

First published in: Dorling, D., Brookes, A. and Davey Smith, G. (2020) Why are coronavirus rates rising in some areas of England and not others? The Conversation, October 1st

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Notes

On the fourth coronavirus and the possibility that is was source of the 1889 epdeimic see: Vijgen, Leen; Keyaerts, Els; Moës, Elien; Thoelen, Inge; Wollants, Elke; Lemey, Philippe; Vandamme, Anne-Mieke; Van Ranst, Marc (2005). “Complete Genomic Sequence of Human Coronavirus OC43: Molecular Clock Analysis Suggests a Relatively Recent Zoonotic Coronavirus Transmission Event��. Journal of Virology. 79 (3): 1595��1604. doi:. PMC 544107. PMID 15650185; and Knudsen, Jeppe Kyhne (13 August 2020). “Overraskende opdagelse: Coronavirus har tidligere lagt verden ned�� [Surprising discovery: Coronavirus has previously brought down the world]. DR (in Danish). Retrieved 13 August 2020: ‘A presumed influenza pandemic in 1889 was actually caused by coronavirus, Danish research show.��

On Winston Churchill’s poem see Mark Honigsbaum (2010) The Great Dread: Cultural and Psychological Impacts and Responses to the ‘Russian�� Influenza in the United Kingdom, 1889��1893, Social History of Medicine, Volume 23, Issue 2, August 2010, Pages 299��319, , Published: 09 June 2010.

On Antony Burgess�� memories of what his father had said to him, see: Alice Reid (2005) The Effects of the 1918��1919 Influenza Pandemic on Infant and Child Health in Derbyshire, Medical History, 49(1): 29��54.

Dorling, D., Brookes, A. and Davey Smith, G. (2020) Why are coronavirus rates rising in some areas of England and not others? The Conversation, October 1st,

For a PDF of this article and its original publication details click.

As Eva Gómez-Jiménez and Michael Toolan explain in the Introduction to this book, high economic inequality has, in the past, been associated with high inflation, as was the case in Germany in the 1930s, and/or with much faster than average growing debt, as has been the case in the United States until very recently. Income inequalities, and the extent to which they are high, can be measured in many ways, but the Gini coefficient is the most widely used one and hence I will use that below. It makes little difference as to which measure is used

As I write, in late 2019, the OECD reports that the most unequal of its larger member states include both Chile and Mexico, but inequalities have fallen greatly in those two countries in recent years as the grip of the United States on their ideology slowly recedes. However, they have not fallen fast enough in Chile where the president (Sebastián Piñera) is a billionaire and widespread protests against inequality broke out in October of that year. The next most unequal is Turkey. Its income inequality Gini coefficient is 0.40 and it is ruled by President Erdoğan. Following Turkey is the United States with a Gini of 0.39, ruled by President Trump who occasionally threatens Turkey. Next most unequal of all the dozen large OECD states is the UK, where the latest Gini reported in 2019 was 0.36 at the time when Prime Minister Johnson was in power. All three states are now more unequal than Israel, where Netanyahu is Prime Minister and the Gini stands at 0.34 and Russia with a Gini of 0.33 where the president has been Putin for some time. Inequality and despots tend to go together; but which comes first –the inequality, the man with the policies promoting inequality or the background of inequality that strongly encourages many voters to turn (in their frustration) to a reactionary strongman �� is hard to determine.

By contrast, the most equitable of OECD countries are listed below with the Slovak Republic and Chile at the extreme points (the former being twice as equitable as the latter). I have not added the names of presidents and prime ministers to the list below because who they are is relatively unimportant in more equitable countries and they are often not household names because of that. It is well worth researchers remembering that not everywhere in the rich world is like Chile, Turkey, the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel or Russia. In fact, they are the outliers. If you are reading this book you probably live in one of the two states that ironically has ‘United�� at the start of its name. It is much more common to live somewhere more equitable. Furthermore, the majority of poorer countries in the world are currently experiencing a fall in income inequalities within them (if not between them). Poor countries tend to be more unequal; but they also tend to be seeing historical inequalities falling more often than not in recent years. People rarely know this, or celebrate it, because if they did then the pressure to continue the trend would wane and inequalities would quickly be increased again through the actions of the rich and greedy. It is possible to gain greater equality. It is possible to preserve greater equality. But to do so you need to know what happens when you don’t do that and how the greedy take back control. This book shows how the UK and its media have been an object lesson in the greedy �� for now at least �� taking back control.

High inequality is associated with a greater rate of crime, especially the most violent crimes of murder and rape. Furthermore, almost all indicators of social progress stall when economic inequalities rise, health improvements end, educational outcomes among children begin to falter and more people find themselves homeless or very precariously or expensively housed. Given all this you might have assumed that inequality would be a gift to the press as it would enable journalists both to talk about things they talk about most often, but in more depth, and to construct a wider narrative between the stories of woe that the media so often concentrate on. However, as Eva Gómez-Jiménez and Michael Toolan in the introduction of this book explain by brilliantly summarizing Michael Sandel: ‘we have passed from having a market economy, to being a market economy�� (Sandel, 2012) and that has altered the nature of the game that is being played and what the media then does.

When you live in a market economy you live in a world where the normal human relationships of reciprocity have been eroded away. The term ‘market economy�� is utterly misleading. It is neither about a market nor about an economy. A market is a place where people come together to trade. A market has a boundary around it and rules within it (which do not apply outside of the market). You might, in the past, have travelled to the market town. When you arrived you would then go to the market. At that market you might sell what you were carrying with you and then buy what you wanted. When you left the market, you left that space of exchange that was often with strangers and went back to the normal world of social interactions based on mutual respect, feudal order, clerical oversight or whatever, but you were no longer in the market.

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Table A.1 The Most Equitable OEDCD Countries in the World as Reported in 2019 (Most Equal OCED States��):

Gini Coefficient Reported 2019

“Sweden�� 0.282

“Belgium�� 0.266

“Finland�� 0.266

“Norway�� 0.262

“Denmark�� 0.261

“Iceland�� 0.255

“Czech Republic�� 0.253

“Slovenia�� 0.244

“Slovak Republic�� 0.241

Source: (accessed 8 October 2019).

The market was a place you had to go to, often the place where it was decreed by law that the market should be. There was nothing especially moral about such markets. For centuries they included slave markets. But there was a reason why they were bounded and controlled. People knew that interactions within the market tended to devalue people and life. This was one reason why markets were bounded, so that they could be controlled. It was not simply that the market was a geographically convenient place to meet. It was that the market had to be controlled, and that control included the levying of taxes.

The ‘being a market economy�� is not about economics but about becoming a particular type of society where everything is for sale, all the time, everywhere. Hopes, dreams and aspirations can be bought and sold. A university degree in a market economy is something you are sold with the promise that it will fulfil a dream. It is sold on false pretences. You are told, often subliminally through images of happy smiling students on university webpages, that securing it will make you happy, and, later, successful and rich.

When that does not occur and you complain, they send you to the counselling service and so the university can look as if it is caring (and defend itself against a future lawsuit), but the message you are really given is ‘more fool you��, you are just one individual example of market failure, but your dashed dreams are part of the creative destruction of the market economy ideology �� the fire of brutal competition out of which the winner (who rightfully takes all) always emerges like a phoenix.

Being a market economy means being unequal and driving up inequalities. There are always a few spectacular winners; there must be when inequality is very high. A few people have to secure a great proportion of all the resources available at a place and time to properly become a market economy (rather than being a society with available but well controlled and limited markets). The market economy society runs to a particular mantra. He who wins most deserved to win most. Those who lost out did not try hard enough or were unlucky. And who wishes to be unlucky? If men so often do so much better than women, well that is just what the market decreed. Nothing is out of bounds because that would be interference with the market. The market is a god, a god that is omnipresent and rewards most highly the true believers. So, believe in the market or perish.

The vast majority of people who win most when the market is god are men. But it is women who are often presented as winners. In the introduction to this book several celebrity women, Beyoncé and the Kardashians (Khloé, Kim and Kourtney) are singled out. We only know them and their stories because of media outlets holding them up high. A couple of generations ago Beyoncé would have been a singer, today she is a phenomena and tomorrow she will be just a shadow of her celebrity memory. Kourtney was born in 1979, Kim in 1980, Beyoncé was born in 1981 and Khloé in 1984. They all became famous in their twenties when they were most saleable. They are all products. The newspaper and cable TV channels they appear on are products. The journalist is a product that can be bought and sold, hired and fired. Everything has a price. Every product has its time, and always there is a new product, a new trend, an emerging market �� all the time, day and night �� this has occurred to every society that has become a market. Eventually the money lenders set up stall in what used to be temples.

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For a PDF which includes the rest of this afterword, and a link to the book this final chapter appears, in click .

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Figure A.1 ‘Here’s to the brave new world!�� By Illingworth, Leslie Gilbert, published in the
Daily Mail, 2 December 1942.

In 1968, at the height of the last great influenza pandemic, at least a million people worldwide died, . That year A.M.M. Payne, a professor of epidemiology at Yale University, :

In the conquest of Mount Everest anything less than 100% success is failure, but in most communicable diseases we are not faced with the attainment of such absolute goals, but rather with trying to reduce the problem to tolerable levels, as quickly as possible, within the limits of available resources��

That message is worth repeating because the schism between those seeking “�� versus those seeking “�� is very much evident in the current pandemic. On September 21, the BMJ that opinion among UK scientists is divided as to whether it is better to focus on protecting those most at risk of severe COVID, or imposing lockdown for all.

One group of 40 scientists wrote to the chief medical officers of the UK suggesting that they should aim to “suppress the virus across the entire population��.

In , a group of 28 scientists suggested that “the large variation in risk by age and health status suggests that the harm caused by uniform policies (that apply to all persons) will outweigh the benefits��. Instead, they called for a “targeted and evidence-based approach to the COVID-19 policy response��.

A week later, science writer wrote a piece for the Guardian arguing that the positions in the letter with 28 authors represent those of a small minority of scientists. “The overwhelming scientific consensus still lies with a general lockdown,�� he claimed.

A few days later, over 60 doctors wrote saying: “We are concerned due to mounting data and real world experience, that the one-track response threatens more lives and livelihoods than Covid-lives saved.��

This will undoubtedly continue for some time yet, although those involved will hopefully begin to see opposing scientific views and opinions as a gift and an opportunity to be sceptical and learn, rather than as a “rival camp��.

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Scientific consensus takes time

There are issues, such as global warming, where there is scientific consensus. But consensuses take decades, and COVID-19 is a new disease. Uncontrolled experiments in lockdown are still ongoing, and the long-term costs and benefits are not yet known. I very much doubt that most scientists in the UK have a settled view on whether pub gardens or universities campuses should be closed or not. People I talk to have a range of opinions: from those who accept that the disease is now endemic, to those who wonder if it can still be eradicated.

Some suggest that any epidemiologist who does not toe a particular line is suspect, or has not done enough and that their views should not carry much weight. They go on to dismiss the views of other scientists and non-scientist academics as irrelevant. But science is not a dogma, and views often need to be modified in the light of increasing knowledge and experience. I am a geographer, so I am used to seeing such games of academic hierarchy played above me, but I do worry when people resort to insulting their colleagues rather than admit that knowledge and circumstance have changed and reappraisal is necessary.

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A grim calculus

Is the cure worse than the disease? This is the question that currently divides us, so it is worth considering how it might be answered. We would have to know how many people would die of other causes, for example, of suicide (including ) that would not have otherwise occurred, or liver disease from the increase in alcohol consumption, from cancers that were not diagnosed or treated, to determine the point at which particular policies were taking more lives than they were saving. And then what value should you put on those lost or damaged lives against the economic consequences?

We do not live in a perfect world with perfect data. For children, for whom the risk of death from COVID is almost zero and the risks of long-term effects are thought to be very low, it is easier to weigh up the negative effects of not going to school or of being trapped in households with rising domestic abuse.

For university students, who are mostly young, a similar set of calculations could be made, including estimating the “cost�� of having the infection now, versus the cost of having it later, possibly when the student is with their older relatives at Christmas. With older people, though, the calculus �� even in a perfect world �� would become increasingly complex. When you are very old and have very little time left, what risks would you be willing to take? One elderly man famously : “No pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in a geriatric home in Weston-super-Mare.��

Safety, but at what cost?

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A recent paper, , suggests that even in Hong Kong, where compliance with mask-wearing has been over 98% since February, local elimination of COVID is not possible. If it is not possible there, it may not be possible anywhere.

On the brighter side, elsewhere, elderly people have been protected even when transmission rates are high and overall resources are low. In India, found that “it is plausible that stringent stay-at-home orders for older Indian adults, coupled with delivery of essentials through social welfare programs and regular community health worker interactions, contributed to lower exposure to infection within this age group in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh.��

However, minimising mortality is not the only goal. For those who don’t die, the outcome prolonged and severe debility. That, too, must be taken into account. But unless you are sure that a particular measure for locking down will do more good than harm, in the round, you should not do it. In 1970, shortly before he became dean of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, C.E. Gordon Smith :

The essential prerequisite of all good public health measures is that careful estimates should be made of their advantages and disadvantages, for both the individual and the community, and that they should be implemented only when there is a significant balance of advantage. In general, this ethic has been a sound basis for decision in most past situations in the developed world although, as we contemplate the control of milder diseases, quite different considerations such as the convenience or productivity of industry are being brought into these assessments.

Current beliefs of where the balance of advantages and disadvantages lie are changing. The “rival camps�� rhetoric needs to end. No individual or small group represents the view of the majority.

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, Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography,

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

For a PDF of this article and a link to the original source click .

In the week after the schools went back in England and Wales, an extra 538 people died (77 a day). Over the previous five years, an average of 8720 people had died that week in September, but this year the number surged to 9258. How many more would be dead by Christmas?

The next week there was a lull: only 289 excess deaths. But then the universities returned, and the excess mortality count doubled. In the week ending 25 September, 574 more people had died each day. There was a drop to 319 excess deaths the following week, and then a rise to 678 (97 a day). On and on it went, week after week after week. Almost five thousand excess deaths were recorded between the schools going back and the start of December. The year was 2015 and most people weren’t paying attention. No one read the numbers out.

The rise in mortality in autumn 2015 had little to do with the schools or universities returning. It wasn’t due to the onset of winter. It wasn’t because of a second wave of a new virus. It was business as usual. After five years of swingeing cuts to health and social services, many more people died each day than had in the five previous years �� which were themselves not particularly good times, but the depths of recession.

Imagine if in autumn 2015 you had been told how many people were dying each day. Would you have been fearful? Or would you have said to yourself: ‘They are mostly old, or poor; this is all very unfortunate, but I won’t be in that grisly rising aggregate��? It can be hard to imagine what effect the relentless reporting of the excess deaths in autumn 2015 might have had. Imagine now, however, that the figures had been read out all year and you had already heard much higher numbers in January and February, along with front-page stories of the health service falling apart and undertakers running out of mortuary space.

The mortality surge lasted for weeks at the start of 2015. It went up suddenly. In one week in January, as the hospitals became overwhelmed, the number of excess deaths rose from 448 to 4050, then 3721, 3220, 2408, 1719, 1470, not dipping below 1000 until mid-March. It rose again to 1973 in the worst week in April, and to 1290 in the worst week of June. Had every newspaper been reporting the weekly (never mind daily) figures in 2015, we could even have imagined five waves by the autumn. All those earlier figures were far higher than the autumn of 2015; and �� so far �� the excess deaths for autumn 2015 are far higher than in autumn 2020. The major difference, of course, is that five years ago there was no talk of the numbers soaring exponentially out of control. The pool of potential victims appeared limited, and didn’t include government ministers, newspaper editors, or most of their voters and readers.

The most common listed causes of the excess deaths in 2015 were Alzheimer’s and dementia; but there was no biological reason these diseases should have been killing people earlier than they had before. The most important reasons were neglect, underfunding and the system becoming overwhelmed. For younger adults the causes were described as diseases of despair (drug overdose, suicide, alcoholic liver disease). Influenza played a small part, but in nearby countries it was dealt with by better funded health services and far fewer died.

If we had reported mortality in 2015 as we report it today, would something have been done about a problem that was far easier to fix than a new pandemic? Might the 2015 election have turned out differently? Or would we then, as now, have been paralysed by fear? As it is, we now have not only Covid-19 to deal with, but the continued legacy of austerity, and Brexit to come, not to mention the climate crisis. The long-term solutions, once we have a vaccine, are the same as were needed five years ago. Whether or not we will reach for them is less clear.

For the original version of this blog and a PDF of it click .

Growing alarm has been expressed over the rising numbers of people who are testing positive for COVID-19 in the UK.

First published October 1st 2020 in .

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Growing alarm has been expressed over the of people who are testing positive for COVID-19 in the UK. More tests have been made available and more people have been taking those tests, but that alone does not explain the increases in the numbers of those who have tested positive, nor why there is such variation across different parts of the nation.

We can explore a number of theories as the basis for this increase. For example, children returned to schools in Scotland on August 11, and eight days later peaked at 141 before dipping and then rising further again. A similar pattern was seen in England. It’s also likely that people returning from holidays with the infection contributed to these rises.

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The role of schools

Using the allows us to zoom in on a map of positive COVID-19 tests around the UK. One of the authors of this piece, Danny Dorling, lives in Oxford. When the case numbers first rose abruptly, he identified where the largest increase occurred near to his home. This was a neighbourhood that is mostly made up of a school, Eton College, located in the town of Windsor some distance away to the south-east. In the week ending September 16, this neighbourhood had one of the largest rises in cases reported in the south of England, but there were also similar rises in the north.

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An excerpt from the Manchester Guardian, 1957.

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The dashboard shows that there were ten or more cases in the school’s area in the week of 10-16 September. The students had just returned from holidays, after which “�� of them returned positive results when the school decided to test them all, according to a statement from Eton. This is a good example of how the number of positive cases increases when more testing is done, but it also shows how schools reopening can increase cases.

Incidentally, 63 years ago �� and in a very similar way to today �� the Manchester Guardian reported that half the boys at Eton had been struck down in the influenza pandemic of that year, which was also badly affecting schools in Glasgow.

The map below shows just how unusual the Eton cluster was when it emerged. It was one of the first educational outbreaks in England this autumn. Oxford can be seen in the north of the map and the school can be found just south of Slough. At this point, it was the only neighbourhood with 10-19 cases in that very large area. Each neighbourhood in the map below is called an MSOA (middle layer super output area) and there are 6,791 of them in England.

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Former hotspots are less affected

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Apart from particular schools resuming teaching, what else might explain why rates of new cases have been rising in some areas more than others?

The best predictor for England seems to be how severely each neighbourhood was affected when the disease first arrived, which is illustrated by the graph below. If we look at the proportion of all deaths in which COVID-19 was mentioned on the death certificate reported in an area in the months of March, April, May and June, we can see that where that proportion was under 30% the first time around, the number of positive cases subsequently found in those neighbourhoods tends to vary between 0.4 and 1.4 per 1,000 residents, rising linearly with the severity of the initial outbreak. This might be as expected if the disease had remained at a higher (although still low compared with the peak) level in some of these places, or if people in some regions were elderly or in care homes that made them more susceptible.

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Danny Dorling, Author provided

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There are other possible interpretations of this finding. One is that the new cases simply reflect a proportional resurgence of those earlier outbreaks �� that is, a continuation of the first wave re-emerging more severely where more cases occurred previously. Other possibilities relate to testing. For example, more test centres may have been placed in areas that suffered more deaths early on, so a larger fraction of all cases in those regions are being detected. Other changes to testing regimes could influence case numbers.

A potentially more significant possibility is suggested by this graph if we look to its right-hand side. This pattern implies that areas with the highest levels of previous mortality do not show marked resurgences of cases this time around. Specifically, in neighbourhoods where between half and three-quarters of all the earlier deaths were thought to have involved or been directly caused by COVID-19, the numbers of people recently testing positive for the disease falls dramatically.

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Possible explanations

It is still too early to know exactly what the patterns most recently revealed mean in epidemiological terms. Each week, we get more data that will help us explore this, chance fluctuations also matter, but there are some possible explanations to consider in the short term and that we do not have space to elaborate on here.

It could be that enough people in these areas have already come into contact with the virus to render the population less susceptible to the disease. Overall, this would imply that the levels of some forms of immunity in those particular neighbourhoods are higher �� at a level that leads to a detectable reduction in the number of new cases.

Such immunity will not be all or nothing �� it will not mean that people are no longer in any way susceptible to coronavirus infection �� rather it would mean that people need a more sustained, higher viral-load exposure to become infected, or, if infected, show fewer symptoms and so are less likely to be tested. Testing regimens could also be influencing this pattern.

We don’t know which of the above explains the inverted-U shaped pattern, but we can confirm that there are 158 such neighbourhoods, mostly in London, where only a relatively few people who have been tested recently returned positive results. In the next few weeks, researchers will be watching closely to see how case numbers rise in the areas that suffered most in spring, especially in London.

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, Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography, ; , Professor of Genomics and Bioinformatics, , and , Professor of Clinical Epidemiology,

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

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Long before the 2020 pandemic swept the world, almost everything was already slowing down. Try measuring the changing speed of change. I did and I wrote a book called ‘Slowdown�� to describe what was happening. I found that only a few aspects of human life were still accelerating at the start of 2020, less than half a dozen of the global datasets we tend to monitor routinely and which my colleagues and I began to look in detail at almost twenty years ago when we were starting to think about a project that came to called “worldmapper��. The tiny handful that were still accelerating in early 2020 included the number of air flights we were taking each year, our overall consumption of material goods, and global rates of carbon pollution. Today, we are all too aware that even these measures are now slowing; but almost everything else we did before 2020 had already stop rising at quickly as it had been before. Much was still rising, but capitalism was stalling. Consider, for instance, debts and wages.

Everywhere you look in the world there are loans, but the loans in the United States are larger than anywhere else. For young people in the US student loans were still rising at the start of 2020, but the speed of that rise has been slowing down for many years now, albeit only slowing slowly as the total continues to grow larger and larger. Automobile loans in the United States were, until spring 2020, still rising as well, but the rate of that rise was also slowing down during the 2010s, a little more quickly than student loans. Next (in terms of the magnitude of what Americans borrow) is the mortgage needed if you are to buy a home. In America, you have a secure place to live only if you buy. If you rent, you can be moved on, even if you have enough money to pay the rent by a landlord who chooses to raise the rent or just evict you for some other reason.

In many countries there is a choice, for some, between renting and buying. Rents are regulated by the state, usually the local government, and are not allowed to increase quickly or to be set at a level that is too high for the quality and size of property being rented. Tenants have a right to stay in their home if they pay their rent. In a few of the best-organized of the world’s affluent countries, if a landlord wants to take back possession of a property, he or she must offer the tenant financial compensation, and if it is not enough, then the tenant can choose to carry on renting and living there. It is, after all is said and done, a home. A home is much more than mere property. In today’s strange times this simple truth is easier to grasp �� everyone needs somewhere safe to sleep. The pandemic makes it far clearer how evil eviction is; but without eviction a significant component of capitalism becomes bankrupt.

Before the pandemic housing prices in many countries were rising, but rising more slowly than they had done in past decades. It is often when secure renting becomes an almost impossible option that the prices of houses and apartments can skyrocket. Outside of the United states, across Europe and in China and Japan, we see that people are generally better protected to live in their homes; especially during a pandemic emergency; and the better protected renters are �� the lower that housing prices overall can be kept. It is the United States which is most unusual �� especially as its officials tried to ignore the implications of the 2020 pandemic when it first began. Within Europe it is the United Kingdom which is most like the United States, most economically unequal and the one place where housing is often as expensive as in the United States. Oxford (England) is similar to San Francisco in terms of cost of living. When the book ‘Slowdown�� was published in the US (in May 2020) the highest mortality rates in the world from the pandemic were in the Bronx in New York and in the borough of Brent in London. One in one thousand residents have died in both places �� we are hoping that this is the worse it will be, anywhere.

It was where economic inequality was greatest, a country was rich, many people were old, and capitalism was most rampant that the pandemic was most deadly. Today, in most states of the United States, tenants have very few rights. Rents can be increased at the whim of the landlord, and so tenants can be easily evicted simply by raising their rent. This harms their health. The quality of rented property can be abysmal, and the rent can be significantly higher than the mortgage for an equivalent property. Those who can buy try to. However, for most people being able to buy means being able to borrow to buy, and that depends on their credit history. Furthermore, the interest rate at which they are lent money in the United States can vary both over time and by who they are and where they live—even though redlining is supposed to be illegal today. People have individual credit ratings. All this weakens a population physically so that then an infectious illness strikes, more die than die in more equitable countries.

Buying a home in the United States is not like buying a home in much of Europe, where mortgages with interest rates fixed for as long as two decades or more are common. Buying a home is better than renting, but still often perilous, as if you fail to make each mortgage payment the lender can take possession of your home and evict you. If you are not in this situation, try to imagine it. The rich in the United States avoid this peril by buying in cash with the money they have made, often interest received directly or indirectly from lending to those who are not rich. When there is great economic inequality, trying to be or stay rich often appears the best aim to have. But only a small minority can ever be rich. And today, as wealth evaporates, as stocks and shares (that are not high tech) plummet in value �� as sentiment collapses in the value, all that is solid appears (at least for now) to crumble.

It is not that difficult to build a house or an apartment; human beings have been doing it for millennia. It is, however, hard to control speculation and inflation. Just after the Second World War, in 1949, all outstanding U.S. mortgage debt, including the borrowings of landlords as well as those of households, stood at only $54 billion. By 1953 it had more than doubled, to $112 billion. It doubled again to $227 billion by 1960, and again to $450 billion by 1969. It hit $1 trillion in 1977, $2 trillion in 1984, $4 trillion in 1992, and $8 trillion in 2002. It rose every quarter from 1949, without exception, until the second quarter of 2008, and then it fell for twenty successive quarters in a row, right through to the third quarter of 2013. Something fundamentally different had just occurred: a system of housing finance that had appeared to work well for over six decades had crashed.

The housing system in the United States had been working well only for a minority of Americans, and especially well for those rich enough to buy more than one home. There is almost no social housing in the United States, or housing managed and rented out at affordable rates by local government or charities. The pandemic exposed this. Almost everyone who cannot buy has to rent privately. Many who can buy have trouble paying the mortgage every month. If you lose your job, become ill, or split up from your partner, it is especially hard to continue to make the payments �� as many tens and possible a hundred million in the USA can tell you all too well. A huge number of people have spent years paying off part of their mortgage and still do not end up owning a home. Others have had to take out interest-only loans because they were deemed ineligible for a repayment mortgage. As the price of housing rose and rose in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, the majority of Americans lost out, especially the young and the poor.

The money we pay for our homes has very little connection to the cost of building them. Nor is it much related to any rule of supply and demand. The demand for homes did not suddenly fall in 2008 or 2020, but the supply of money that could be borrowed in order to buy homes did collapse at both times. We are often told that the value of a home mainly reflects the value of the land it is built on, but that is also a chimera. The value of land in the United States did not suddenly degrade in 2008 or 2020. There never was some mystical intrinsic land value that was holding up prices; instead, the housing market was a game being played by a few people lending more and more money to a much larger number of people who needed somewhere to live. House prices reflected the money supply for mortgages. The lenders were pushing up prices. They lobbied government to give borrowers tax incentives in order to make what they were doing appear less predatory. They preyed on the fears and needs of the many who had to borrow to be able to have a home. When slowdown comes, it is a sign that such a system is beginning to end. And the rise in mortgage borrowing in the US began to slowdown years before the 2020 pandemic triggered the current economic crash.

Behind the series of crashes and recessions that so obsess us; behind each crisis that we write so much about, there has been a more general slowdown. This pandemic hit during that slowdown. Previous pandemics in 1918, 1951, 1957 and 1968 hit when capitalism was still accelerating. The acceleration is now over and so even a small pandemic can trigger a devastating economic collapse.

So what about wages? As I write millions of people around the world have just found themselves without work. The largest ever number to try to claim benefits in a day in the USA have just tried. In the UK the on-line queue to apply for universal credit was over one hundred thousand people long on one day. In Canada people have all been promised a basic income if they need it of two thousand dollars a month for up to four months. However, in much of North West mainland Europe safety nets were already in place before the current crisis. Norway locked down at the same time as the United Kingdom but people in Norway have not been thrown into destitution because there welfare state has proper safety nets; because they were already moving away from what many think of as capitalism. Safety nets matter because wages matter so much. In Germany the furlough scheme is being extended into 2021. Wages and welfare are how society tells you how much you are worth in the modern world. At the figure below shows, they were rising for Americans lucky to have a full-time job after 2014 until 2019 �� when they stopped rising much at all �� the rise had been slowing down as can be seen from the labels 2015 to 2019 getting closer and closer together.

U.S. median full-time employee weekly real earnings, 1979��2019

The median wage is the wage level when the number of people earning more than that amount is equal to the number who earn less. The Figure (above) shows the timeline of median weekly earnings for a privileged group that is currently shrinking in number in the United States—full-time workers. The pandemic is, for now, increasing the rate of demise of the full-time worker. Although full-time workers are rarely described as privileged, full-time work tends to be far better rewarded and less precarious than part-time work. Having any paid work at all automatically puts you above the most disadvantaged in any society, at least for as long as we continue to reward some people so much more than others, rather than allocating to people what they need, and encouraging them to choose to do what is most useful rather than what will make the most money for the man or woman who employs them.

Even though the second a third waves of the 1968 influenza pandemic hit in 1970 and 1972, the early 1970s were the best of times for American workers (and workers in many other countries around the richest parts of the world, including in the United Kingdom where I have growing up at that time). Inequality was at its lowest (ever) and real weekly wages were at their highest. However, when measured in constant dollars, so that a dollar is of the same value in terms of what it can buy over time, U.S. median wages plummeted at the end of the 1970s, as the figure above makes clear. The average U.S. worker did worse and worse. For the median full-time employee, there were falls in real income of over 4 percent and then over 3 percent a year in 1979 and 1980. Ronald Reagan proclaimed the start of his time in office “morning in America”—it turned out to be a cold and dismal morning for the majority. Furthermore the 1970s were only so good because the exploitation of the rest of the world was still so rife back then. Britain still had a handful of colonies; but more important �� international relations then were still colonial.

We might expect the 2020 pandemic to loop wages round and down in the very near future to where they stood in the 1980s, because there are now so many millions more people looking for work at any wage rate. U.S. median full-time wages plummeted to a low of just over $310 a week in 1981. The subsequent recovery was trivial: a real-terms rise by the late 1980s to not quite $330 a week, about $3 a day more. Half of all fulltime workers and a majority of Americans were taking home less than $47 a day to live on. Then, during the late 1980s, most of that tiny gain was lost. The early 1990s recovery was even more trivial. The late 1990s recovery finally secured that extra $3 a day again. Twenty years of technological gains had led to mass unemployment, constant layoffs, insecurity, the breaking of unions, the breaking of communities, the breaking of families, and the breaking of people. It took twenty years, to achieve a gain of only 15 cents a year. What can you buy with three (1983) dollars? The most recent full-time U.S. workers are now the second generation to have lived their lives in this particular déjà vu universe. But all has not remained the same. Inequalities have widened greatly during these years �� and all this before pandemic hit the economy.

People fear slowdown because they think the current situation is the way it has to be. In the United States, people believe, because they are told it is so, that without economic growth the vast majority will suffer. Stability is equated with poverty. But there is absolutely no need for this to be the case. It is not just that there were periods in the past when the United States as a whole had far less, but when far more people were far better off. You can also look today at places where the slowdown has been most abrupt, but where they have adapted best to it. If you think Japan is too difficult for most Americans to use as a point of comparison, then look to Europe and at what is currently happening there.

Outside of the United States, automation, shrinking demand, and the new deal for the sharing of resources are often dealt with very differently. In Finland they employ “tripartite labour market cooperation�� to ensure that middle-aged median workers do not fall behind the rest, but instead actually enjoy the fruits of their labor. Tripartite cooperation is common in Denmark, even though it is blamed for being too slow at times. In Germany and Sweden, official reports sometimes tediously explain that “social partners . . . had participated in at least eight large tripartite commissions on digitalization and labor market issues by 2016.�� If you don’t know what a tripartite commission is, you probably live in the United Kingdom or the United States (or in between the two in Ireland!). It is the agreement of contracts between employers�� organizations, trade unions, and the government of a country.

Outside of the rich world, conditions are sometimes much worse than those found today in the United States. Just over a year ago, in February 2019, the Malaysian newspaper New Straits Times reported that hundreds of millions of people remained very poor despite holding down one or more jobs. It cited a global report that concluded: “a majority of the 3.3 billion people employed around the globe last year suffered a ‘lack of material well-being, economic security, equal opportunities or scope for human development�� [and that] . . . a full 700 million people are living in extreme or moderate poverty despite having employment.�� The Straits Times told its readers that 61 percent of all workers worldwide, some 2 billion people, were in informal employment, with few or no social and/or contractual protections. The countries where these people live and work have very often adopted the practices of the United States, and so alongside that country they may be among the last to take part in the transition to greater stability; but they might well make the turn required more quickly in future.

The United States is currently the least progressive rich country in the world in terms of improving the living standards of its people. How the USA, and the least progressive county in Europe (the UK) cope with this crisis will partly reflect how each was failing to reject holding onto capitalism as an ideal. The 2020 pandemic could well begin a process of ‘levelling down��. This may, in the long term be progressive, it is what happened in much Europe in the 1920s after the First World War and in the USA after the Second World War. Taxes were raised on the rich to pay for the economic and social crises; people expected government to help because War, like a pandemic, was not of their making. The alternative, ‘levelling up�� is impossible �� you cannot all be rich, but you can all be safer, more equal and less ignorant.

Note �� this opinion piece is elaborated on at greater length in Dorling, D. (2020) Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration �� and why it’s good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives, New Haven: Yale University Press.

For a PDF of this article and a link to teh academic journal is appeared in click .

It is a conundrum. For much of the past two months, many people have been convinced that mortality associated with COVID-19 would rise as the number of people testing positive with the disease increased. But this has not happened so far.

Coronavirus: why aren’t death rates rising with case numbers?

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It is a conundrum. For much of the past two months, many people have been convinced that mortality associated with COVID-19 would rise as the number of people testing positive with the disease increased. But this has not happened so far. Why? A look at can provide some clues.

By late summer 2020, the UK government had finally managed to produce a consistent definition of precisely what constitutes a positive case of coronavirus. It is defined as a person with at least one lab-confirmed positive COVID-19 test result (individuals who tested positive more than once are only counted once, on the date of their first positive test).

The first graph below shows cases by the day on which they were initially reported �� represented by the blue line. Cases peaked at 5,451 on April 5, reached a low of 101 on June 10 and very recently have appeared to be rapidly rising again. The most recent rise in cases, to more than 2,600 a day, is particularly unsettling. The red line shows deaths per day, which have been very low for many weeks now and also still falling in number.

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Danny Dorling, Author provided

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It’s important to remember that the number of cases has not been rising because the number of people carrying the disease has been increasing, but instead because more tests are being carried out, and especially in areas where the rate at which people have the disease is found to be higher.

The main reasons why we know that the number of deaths has not been rising is that the actual number of cases in the population has not been rising when measured per million people tested. We know this because the Office for National Statistics (ONS) is running a which estimated that by August 25 only one person in every 2,000 in England had the disease, and each week only one person in every 27,000 was catching the disease (this proportion having been essentially stable for several months). The proportion in Wales was even lower at one in 2,200.

The ONS is currently increasing the sample size of its surveillance programme to 400,000 people in England with 150,000 being tested .

A question of demographics

It is likely that among the steadily rising number of people who have tested positive for the disease since June, an increasing proportion are young and a declining proportion are older, so that having the disease is dramatically less lethal for each person with it. In March and April (before the was reached) younger adults aged 18-34 had the in antibody testing so we should not be surprised that outside of the most rigorous lockdown, cases are higher among the young.

Your chances of dying with COVID-19 depend primarily on age. Those chances are greatly reduced if you are younger �� as the table below shows.

Danny Dorling, Author provided

According to this data, by the end of August, someone aged 20-24 had a one in 100,000 chance of having died with a mention of COVID-19 on their death certificate; that risk doubles to one in 50,000 for people aged 30-34 and is more than one in 1,000 for men by age 65 and for women by age 75.

Another way of describing what the table reveals is that a grandmother in her early 90s is 120 times more likely to have died of the disease than her daughter aged 52 who, herself, is 259 times more likely to die than her 14-year-old daughter. Currently, mortality rates for all ages are very near zero as deaths per day are so low.

Cases increasing in the young and decreasing among the elderly is how the number of deaths can continue to fall even if cases found by the ONS surveillance study remain the same or even rise slightly, as long as fewer older people have the disease as compared to more younger people over time.

There is growing concern of younger people passing the disease to older people, but if a young person has had the disease, and is then very unlikely to have it in future, their chance of passing it on to an older person in future is much diminished. This is another reason for not hitting when case numbers rise.

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Reaching a true mortality rate

Eventually, mortality rates from COVID-19 will fall as the proportion of people who have had it rises. The final graph below tries to illustrate just how far away from that point we are, but how we have clearly been moving towards it over the course of the past two months.

The graph shows the ratio of deaths to every 1,000 cases recorded each day. This is a crude measure, as mortality lags behind positive cases, but it is still a useful guide.

Danny Dorling, Author provided

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We can see that the number of people dying of COVID-19 falls from 217 for every 1,000 testing positive across all of England and Wales on June 24 (when so few people were being tested), to four by the end of August and just two per 1,000 by September 4. The fall is so fast and so great that a log scale is required to encompass it in one graph.

The fall cannot continue at this rate for much longer, and where the ratio eventually settles will be below the theoretical upper limit for the actual final from this disease; a rate which we do not yet know.

, Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography,

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

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If you are a little older than I am, then you may well remember worse pandemics than that of 2020. While we are still living though this one, we can mostly only speculate as to how it will finally rank; but by the late summer of 2020 mortality from the disease was very low �� and we could start to compare. Because we did not lockdown in the past, because the population was younger and often smaller, we tended to not see the pandemics of the 1950s in anything like the light that we view this one. And in the 1950s an influenza pandemic was far from being a new phenomenon. To get a sense of what a new pandemic felt like in the past, this talk (in a field in Warwickshire) began with the 1854 Cholera epidemic, and London. Press play to hear the talk, or click to learn about the socially distanced toilets.

The first 150 days �� mortality in England and Wales with COVID-19 by date of occurrence.

The socially distanced (individual use) toilets at the Also Festival of 2020

When did we last know so little about a disease that we feared so much?

In Oxford a doctor called Henry Wentworth Acland, plotted cases of cholera on maps of that city. He noted that the number of times the sound of thunder supposedly unaccompanied by lightning, was heard in the city in the three outbreak years was 2, 8 and 4 respectively (Acland, 1856, page 62). He contrasted that with the figures for many other years. Thunder occurring without lightning was then seen as just another of many hundreds of possible causes of the cholera outbreaks.

Henry Wentword Acland’s map of Cholera in Oxford

The rapid geographical spread of COVID-19 across almost all of England and Wales

The first 155 days in England and Wales shown using two log scales.

In terms of absolute mortality rise, the increase in one year in the number of people who have died is remarkable �� the third highest in 100 years �� all due to the length of time of the crisis. In the 166 years since John Snow removed the pump handle in the 1854 Cholora outbreak in Soho, there haveonly been five occasions when mortality suddenly rose by at least aneighth in a year across England and Wales. These were in 1918(influenza: deaths rose by 23%), 1940 (war: 16%), 1929 (cold winter:16%), 1895 (the great freeze: 14%) and in the year to the end of June2020 (COVID-19: 13%). The relative rise in mortality in the year toend June 2020 was greater than the Cholera years of 1846 (12%) or 1849(10%), let alone the smaller rise in 1854 �� although of course ifmeasured by years-of-life lost, the 2020 rise will be less extreme.

Lif expectancy of men and women in England and Wales in the 12 months to the end of June each year.

On July 8th 2020 the Treasury released a document titled “Impact of COVID-19 on working household incomes: distributional analysis as of May 2020��. It’s main claim, highlighted on , was that what the Treasury had done to date “supported the poorest working households the most (as a proportion of February income)��.

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So �� is this claim actually true? The Treasury report is only 7 pages long. At times you have to read between the lines and it helps to know a little about the data sources they used. At no point in the seven pages do its authors define what they mean by “working households��, their object of analysis. The reader is left to assume it is household in which at least one person was still in paid employment by May 2020.

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Treasury document: Chart1A

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Reproduced here, Chart 1A in the Treasury report superficially suggests that, as a proportion of income, it is the poorest tenth of households that have benefitted most from government largess. However, for them and the next worst-off tenth of households, the Treasury’s estimate of benefits received from the “Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme�� otherwise known as furlough is smaller, even as a proportion of their already lowest incomes, than for all other groups of households other than for the best-off two deciles. You can see this simply by looking carefully at Chart 1A. At the same time, the second best-off decile (which for a single person household means someone receiving £52,500 a year) has seen the smallest fall in income, and the best of tenth of household (with median £80,200 a year income for a single person) have benefited the most by being able to offset any losses by paying less tax; £8,000 less to be precise; or about £18,000 less tax for the best-off two adult households with two children. The Treasury’s table of average households incomes is given below which is what you need to know along with Chart 1A to make these calculations.

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Households in the lowest deciles are claimed to have received the most from government because of schemes such as “temporary increase in the Universal Credit standard allowance by £20 a week�� which, if it were to last for a year for those households who received it, would mean they would receive and additional £1000 through spring 2021 �� paltry compared to that saved by already paying £18,000 less in tax for the well-off! However, what matters most in the Treasury’s assumptions is that they believe the self-employment support scheme will most help the poorest two deciles of households! Take away that assumption �� which comes from the fact that a few (occasionally very well-off) self-employed people always report ridiculously low incomes to avoid paying tax �� and the Treasury claim to have aided a progressive redistribution evaporates entirely.

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The Treasury does helpfully produce a second chart, Chart 1B, which shows average welfare support for the poorest tenth of household with someone in work to be only £20 a week when all benefits are included, not just the temporary Universal Credit rise, but also a temporary increase in Working Tax Credit and increase in Local Housing allowances and all other benefits combined. That average £20 a week is paltry. If we also assume the poorest households and not those with some of the largest self-employed incomes in the UK, then Chart 1B shows us that households in the bottom decile have received less than half what households in the middle have received from government and four times less than the very generous £330 a week the best-off tenth of households have received since the crisis began.

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Treasury: Chart1B

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The Treasury analysis ignored 4 days earlier by the Standard Life Foundation who have been funding large independent surveys indicating that an additional four million households (possibly more than ten million people) have now been thrown into serious financial difficulty by the crisis. This raised the total number of UK households who would be in serious financial difficulties by the end of July to ten million in total, or around twenty five million individuals. Such a trend only has to continue for a few more weeks in its current direction for a majority of people in the UK, by the time you are reading these words, to be classed as “struggling to make ends meet�� given what has now happened to their income

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A few days later, on Monday July 13th, the Standard Life Foundation of the Labour Force Survey. It found that 140,000 low paid jobs had been lost by April alone and that “This fall is in spite of the measures put in place to protect jobs (the Job Retention Scheme and Self-Employment Income Support Scheme), suggesting that there is a sizeable group of low income workers missing out on support.�� And also that the well-off had seen no reduction in employment �� in other words inequalities had risen.

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Of course, the 140,000 low paid jobs that have very recently been lost have removed households from the “working household�� definition used by the Treasury so these are not considered in the poorest groups now �� artificially inflating the estimates of their income. Table 1.A shows those Treasury estimates that both ignore the poorest with no work and the very richest who are not in these surveys. Nevertheless, the inequality gap is huge.

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Treasury: Table1A

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I am far from the only one not convinced by the Treasury rhetoric and what they produce as “analysis��. On Thursday 23 July the BBC reported that Mel Stride, Chair of the Treasury Committee the Chancellor “Mr Sunak was turning his back on people in need.�� This was in response to Mr Sunak’s dismissal of the Treasury Committee’s interim report into gaps in support to firms and workers hit by the virus which had been published a week earlier. As a result over a million people lost out on any support.

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In case one Parliamentary committee’s verdict is not enough to convince you, on that same day (23 July) the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee said the economic reaction of the UK government to Covid-19 had been unduly delayed until March and was then unnecessarily rushed meaning the impact of the mistakes made could stretch into the long-term. Overall that committee described the economic planning of the government as “��.

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Both the Treasury Committee and the Public Accounts Committee have a majority of Conservative MPs in their memberships. Some six of the eleven members of the Treasury committee are Conservative MPs, and nine of the sixteen members of the Public Accounts Committee are currently Conservative MPs.

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As I write, fraud . The first arrest was made on July 8th (the same date as the Treasury report was released) of a 57 year old man accused of fraudulently claiming £495,000 (which would of course put his household well into the top 1% of income earners). In June it was reported that: “According to a survey by Crossland Employment Solicitors, 34% of employees have been asked by their bosses to work while being furloughed by their company. At one manufacturing firm, staff received a 20% pay cut as well as being expected to continue working while furloughed. And some employees working for firms with a sponsor licence had been threatened with deportation unless they agreed to the furlough fraud.�� Those who make money out of the crisis by fraudulent means will tend to be working in the private sector and already receiving the highest income �� although of course they would not report that in a household survey!

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The UK was the most unequal country in Europe by household income before the crisis began. Job losses and supposedly temporary furlough layoffs have most effected the poorest households. The best-off households have seen their saving rise during this period as their spending has fallen (far fewer fancy dinners out and no visits to the theatre). The Treasury’s response has been to try to keep as many people where they were in the pecking-order �� a little like letting out the safety car in a stock-car race and not allowing any overtaking; but they have actually managed to do is to widen the gaps and also not prevent many of the poorest falling even further behind and falling below. And all this before the furlough scheme even begins to be reduced and then end, before mass unemployment begins, before school and university leavers enter a job market with fewer labour ‘buyers�� and before the Treasury officials tasked with the job of trying to explain how well they have done presumably begin to tear they hair out wondering how on earth they will be able to continue to produce graphs that fail to convince all but the most gullible.

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At the end of their report the Treasury suggests that “…the broad distributional picture outlined here is consistent with several similar studies�� and they cite two studies. What the first study they cite actually says is that “The pattern of income changes is rather different from that shown in Figure 1 [similar to the Treasury analysis] because the re-ranking effect is so large. Figure 2 shows that the crisis is simulated to lead to a considerable rise in the number of adults with very low disposable income (caused by those who lose all their earnings as a result of the crisis), such that the greatest fall is seen among the bottom decile.�� (on page 18 of report).

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The second report to which the Treasury points as supposedly being collaborative explains: “Taking everything into consideration, the financial situations of low- and high-income households may well be evolving quite differently over the crisis. On the other side of the balance sheet, low-income households are likely to struggle more to cut back spending if they do suffer falls in incomes �� given that more of their spending goes on necessities �� while those on higher incomes might find themselves spending less fairly automatically as a result of the prohibition of many recreational activities. Indeed, those on higher incomes have been more likely to report that they are now spending less.�� (on page 24 of report).

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Figure 2 of the Essex research is shown as the final diagram in this article to compare to Charts 1A and 1B above. What matters most is the “net income�� line.

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Figure 2 of the Essex research is shown as the final diagram in this article to compare to Charts 1A and 1B above. What matters most is the “net income�� line.

I have run out of space. If you wanted to know what the Treasury could have done instead here are just or pointers; but they could also have looked other European countries.

For the original posting of this article and a PDF of it click .