Peter Goldblatt’s invited contribution to the Discussion of ‘Some statistical aspects of the Covid-19 response’ by Wood et al.

The paper presents a new analysis of the number of excess deaths in England during the COVID 19 pandemic, by taking more account than others of the short-term impact on expected number of deaths of the 1946 boom in births and by applying a life table methodology to calculate these expected numbers.These have quite separate effects on the calculations and it is a shame the authors did not provided a clear analysis of the attributable fractions associated with each change -while the first is a temporary phenomenon, the other would have long term implications for monitoring.The authors make a number of claims about other aspects of the handling of the pandemic and its consequences.The evidence base for some of these can be questioned.1) The authors state that "The 2020 [Marmot] report includes a forensic, databased investigation of how health outcomes and life expectancy for the more disadvantaged were worsened by the exacerbation of economic deprivation following the financial crisis of 2008 and subsequent government response to it."In fact, the report makes no mention of the