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PostScript
Letter
Austerity, not influenza, caused the UK’s health to deteriorate. Let’s not make the same mistake again
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, England and Wales had seen stalling life expectancy, rising infant mortality rates, increasing mid-aged mortality (including so-called deaths of despair) and tightening restrictions on access to healthcare.1 Spikes in age-standardised mortality rates have been, by many, attributed almost wholly to influenza, though the evidence does not support this.
As we enter winter 2020 with a health and social care service that has endured a decade of insufficient funding, a population whose health has been worsened by austerity, and now a pandemic, let’s …