One of the key ways to measure a country’s success in fighting covid-19 is to measure deaths from covid-19. However, countries across the world measure deaths in different ways. The UK has reported covid deaths as those who died within 28 days of a positive test. The UK also offers statistics on daily deaths with covid-19 on the death certificate. The US Centres for Disease Control includes both confirmed and probable cases and deaths.239 The historian, Professor Niall Ferguson, told the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee: I actually think there is a better way of looking at this, which is to look at excess mortality. We don’t have excess mortality data for all the countries in the world, but if you look at the ones for which we do have data, the UK and the US are firmly in the middle of the table, with 17% or 18% excess mortality, close to Belgium, close to Italy, close to Spain. 235 Q1115 236 Ofcom, ‘covid-19 news and information: consumption and attitudes- previous results’, accessed 17 September 2021 237 Kings College London, Coronavirus: vaccine misinformation and the role of social media, December 2020 238 See, for example: The Royal Society, Susceptibility to misinformation about COVID-19 around the world, October 2020; The Royal Society, COVID-19 vaccine deployment: Behaviour, ethics, misinformation and policy strategies, October 2020 239 CDC, ‘United States COVID-19 Cases and Deaths by State over Time’, accessed 17 September 2021 Coronavirus: lessons learned to date 57 Some countries in Europe did slightly better—France, Sweden, Switzerland— but there are a great many countries that did a good deal worse. I won’t recap the countries you are expecting to hear—once again, it is Latin American and east European countries that have the worst excess mortality. Of course, some countries in Europe have done significantly better, to the point, in the case of Denmark, of having no excess mortality, or virtually none in Norway. I think this is probably the be