Governments can, and often do, manipulate data. The public, in general, has grown wary of believing any figures quoted by the government as they are generally skewed to suit their own purposes.  On this premise, I set out to examine the figures they cannot manipulate, total death figures.

You would expect 2020 to show horrific figures, after all, we have been bombarded with reports of thousands dying from Covid-19, so the total deaths for 2020 must be through the roof.

At first, I set out to study the figures for my own local area in Moray.  Here are the figures from The National Register for the last 6 years:

2015 – 1,054

2016 – 979

2017 – 1,009

2018 – 1,078

2019 – 1,044

2020 – 1,029

To be absolutely honest, I struggle to relate these figures to a year when thousands have died from Covid-19, so I thought perhaps it would be best to look at the figures for the entire country.

I took the total deaths in Scotland and the corresponding population. Over the past 25 years, the death rate has been an average of 10.95 deaths per 1,000 population. In 2020 this was at a higher rate of 11.7, which although at the higher end of the spectrum, is by no means unprecedented, with 4 years out of the 25 having similar or higher figures.

It must remain a personal view of whether these extra deaths are worth the long term damage done to our country by the severe action taken by the government. We will have to await the death rates for subsequent years, to judge whether the cure helped or made things worse.

Jim Whitelaw for Moray