Tag: Europe

Europe faces ‘cancer epidemic’ after estimated 1m cases missed during Covid

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/nov/15/europe-faces-cancer-epidemic-after-estimated-1m-cases-missed-during-covid

Excerpt:

Experts have warned that Europe faces a “cancer epidemic” unless urgent action is taken to boost treatment and research, after an estimated 1m diagnoses were missed during the pandemic.

The impact of Covid-19 and the focus on it has exposed “weaknesses” in cancer health systems and in the cancer research landscape across the continent, which, if not addressed as a matter of urgency, will set back cancer outcomes by almost a decade, leading healthcare and scientific experts say.

A report, European Groundshot – Addressing Europe’s Cancer Research Challenges: a Lancet Oncology Commission, brought together a wide range of patient, scientific, and healthcare experts with detailed knowledge of cancer across Europe.

One unintended consequence of the pandemic was the adverse effects that the rapid repurposing of health services and national lockdowns, and their continuing legacy, have had on cancer services, on cancer research, and on patients with cancer, the experts said.

“To emphasise the scale of this problem, we estimate that about 1m cancer diagnoses might have been missed across Europe during the Covid-19 pandemic,” they wrote in The Lancet Oncology. “There is emerging evidence that a higher proportion of patients are diagnosed with later cancer stages compared with pre-pandemic rates as a result of substantial delays in cancer diagnosis and treatment. This cancer stage shift will continue to stress European cancer systems for years to come.

Author(s): Andrew Gregory

Publication Date: 15 Nov 2022

Publication Site: The Guardian UK

Book Review: A Global History of the Black Death

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://undark.org/2022/07/29/book-review-a-global-history-of-the-black-death/

Excerpt:

James Belich’s new book, “The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe,” shows the depth and longevity of the controversy over the sources and impacts of an era-defining scourge. Belich, an Oxford University historian, suggests that what is now known as the Black Death was so consequential that its effects equal those of the Enlightenment, the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, and the Renaissance. It’s a staggering implication, but he makes a decent case for it in this bold, tremendously researched work. From illustrating the plague’s effects globally to showing how central it was to Europe’s ascension, Belich demonstrates that the medieval pandemic influenced many aspects of human life.

Once called the Great Death or the Great Plague, the pandemic lasted hundreds of years and was so deadly that it is still popularly referred to simply as the Plague. “The Black Death Pandemic, beginning in 1345, persisted for more than three centuries and involved about 30 major epidemics in all,” writes Belich. What’s more, it “did not always behave like the modern pandemic,” he writes further on. “It killed far more people, for one thing.” Belich’s book implicitly underscores that, compared to the devastation of the plague, Covid-19 is relatively insignificant.

Just how many deaths was the Black Death responsible for? Despite centuries of debate on the subject, there is no consensus. The common belief is that the first wave killed between 25 percent and 33 percent of Western Europeans. (The historian Barbara Tuchman advanced the one-third estimate in her best-selling 1978 book about the 14th century, “A Distant Mirror.”) Belich suggests that the number was far higher. In the first strike alone, the population of Western Europe was cut in half, he writes, citing studies about the death rates in England, France, Italy, and Scandinavia. Many places didn’t return to their pre-plague population levels for some 250 years. (Despite his claims, the true extent of the toll is still widely contested.)

….

In Belich’s view, what made the plague different from other major historical events and catastrophes was that, while it decimated the human population, it left the material world untouched. It “doubled the average amount per person of everything,” from horses to housing, he writes. For a time, this meant more resources for survivors and greater access to luxury goods, better living conditions, and higher wages for workers.

Author(s): Jordan Michael Smith

Publication Date: 29 July 2022

Publication Site: unDark

Tracking covid-19 excess deaths across countries

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker?utm_campaign=a.coronavirus-special-edition&utm_medium=email.internal-newsletter.np&utm_source=salesforce-marketing-cloud&utm_term=2022042&utm_content=ed-picks-article-link-5&etear=nl_special_5&utm_campaign=a.coronavirus-special-edition&utm_medium=email.internal-newsletter.np&utm_source=salesforce-marketing-cloud&utm_term=4/2/2022&utm_id=1119326

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Excerpt:

As covid-19 has spread around the world, people have become grimly familiar with the death tolls that their governments publish each day. Unfortunately, the total number of fatalities caused by the pandemic may be even higher, for several reasons. First, the official statistics in many countries exclude victims who did not test positive for coronavirus before dying—which can be a substantial majority in places with little capacity for testing. Second, hospitals and civil registries may not process death certificates for several days, or even weeks, which creates lags in the data. And third, the pandemic has made it harder for doctors to treat other conditions and discouraged people from going to hospital, which may have indirectly caused an increase in fatalities from diseases other than covid-19.

One way to account for these methodological problems is to use a simpler measure, known as “excess deaths”: take the number of people who die from any cause in a given region and period, and then compare it with a historical baseline from recent years. We have used statistical models to create our baselines, by predicting the number of deaths each region would normally have recorded in 2020 and 2021.

Many Western countries, and some nations and regions elsewhere, regularly publish data on mortality from all causes. The table below shows that, in most places, the number of excess deaths (compared with our baseline) is greater than the number of covid-19 fatalities officially recorded by the government. The full data for each country, as well as our underlying code, can be downloaded from our GitHub repository. Our sources also include the Human Mortality Database, a collaboration between UC Berkeley and the Max Planck Institute in Germany, and the World Mortality Dataset, created by Ariel Karlinsky and Dmitry Kobak.

Publication Date: last updated 13 May 2022

Publication Site: The Economist

Europe’s Covid-19 Vaccination Success Faces Winter Test

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/europes-covid-19-vaccination-success-faces-winter-test-11632303001?mod=djemwhatsnews

Excerpt:

Europe has pushed ahead of the U.S. in vaccinating its citizens and has experienced a summer of relatively subdued Covid-19 caseloads, hospitalizations and deaths, despite the spread of the Delta variant.

Deaths from Covid-19 in the European Union averaged around 525 over the seven days through Tuesday and around 140 in the U.K. In January, daily deaths peaked at 3,500 in the EU and around 1,200 in the U.K., according to national data compiled by the University of Oxford’s Our World in Data project.

Adjusted for population, EU deaths equate to around 1.2 per million a day, and U.K. deaths to 2.1 per million. That compares with 6.1 per million currently in the U.S.

The difference reflects wider vaccine coverage, especially of older and high-risk groups. The 27 countries of the EU have fully vaccinated 61% of the bloc’s 448 million population, compared with 55% in the U.S., according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and its EU counterpart. Big EU nations picked up the vaccination pace after a slow start this year. France has fully vaccinated 67% of its population, Germany 63% and Italy 66%. The U.K., which left the EU in 2020, has fully vaccinated 66% of its residents.

Author(s): Jason Douglas in London, Erin Delmore in Berlin and Eric Sylvers in Milan

Publication Date: 22 Sept 2021

Publication Site: Wall Street Journal

Why do Americans die earlier than Europeans?

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/04/why-do-americans-die-earlier-than-europeans

Excerpt:

A 30-year-old American is three times more likely to die at that age than his or her European peers. In fact, Americans do worse at just about every age. To make matters more grim, the American disadvantage is growing over time.

In 2017, for example, higher American mortality translated into roughly 401,000 excess deaths – deaths that would not have occurred if the US had Europe’s lower age-specific death rates. Pre-pandemic, that 401,000 is about 12% of all American deaths. The percentage is even higher below age 85, where one in four Americans die simply because they do not live in Europe.

…..

There have been many efforts to account for the US mortality disadvantage. There is no single answer, but three factors stand out. First, death rates from drug overdose are much higher in the US than in Europe and have risen sharply in the 21st century. Second is the rapid rise in the proportion of American adults who are obese. In 2016, 40% of American adults were obese, a larger proportion than in Europe. Higher levels of obesity in the US may account for 55% of its shortfall in life expectancy relative to other rich countries. Third, the US stands out among wealthy countries for not offering universal healthcare insurance. One analysis suggests that the absence of universal healthcare resulted in 45,000 excess deaths at ages 18-64 in 2005. That number represents about a quarter of excess deaths in that age range.

…..

Above age 65, healthcare insurance coverage is nearly universal via Medicare. An international review of medical practice by the National Academy of Sciences suggested that the US does comparatively well in identifying and treating cardiovascular diseases and many cancers. But the prevalence of these diseases, the principal killers in wealthy countries, is unusually high in the US. Heart disease, a type of cardiovascular disease and America’s number one cause of death for decades, is strongly linked to lifestyle factors such as obesity. Although the connection between obesity and health risks is well known, consumer preferences for unhealthy food are strong. Not just because humans are biologically vulnerable to sweets and fats, but because major food producers and distributors are incentivized to turn this weakness into profit.

Author(s): Samuel Preston, Yana Vierboom

Publication Date: 4 May 2021

Publication Site: The Guardian UK

Bidenomics Takes Root in Europe’s Economically Fragile South

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidenomics-takes-root-in-europes-economically-fragile-south-11620039617

Excerpt:

Since the 1990s, Italian leaders have tried to overhaul the sclerotic economy while also running tight budgets. Mr. Draghi is the first in decades who can deploy massive fiscal firepower to help.

Italy’s economy has rarely grown by more than 1% annually over the past quarter-century. The economy has never fully recovered from the global financial crisis and subsequent eurozone crisis, and slumped by another 9% in 2020 amid the pandemic and strict lockdowns.

Germany, France and other EU countries backed the recovery fund mainly for fear that Italy and Southern Europe could get stuck in another deep economic slump that once again tests the cohesion and survival of the eurozone.

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Most of Greece’s debt is in bailout loans from the rest of the eurozone, with no repayments due for many years, making another Greek debt crisis unlikely for a long time.

Author(s): Giovanni Legorano

Publication Date: 3 May 2021

Publication Site: Wall Street Journal

Covid 3/25: Own Goals

Mary Pat Campbell
Covid 3/25: Own Goals

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Excerpt:

Those developments are infuriating, and also enlightening as to how the system of the world functions these days, but the main event remains the race between new strains and vaccinations. 

In America the race is plausibly close. Cases are rising, and likely will continue to rise for several more weeks, especially if vaccination rates continue to stagnate. But that acceleration should start soon, and at an additional 3% protection per week that grows and compounds, the vaccinations won’t take that long to turn the tide even if they don’t accelerate much. 

In Europe the race is not so close. Vaccinations are running far slower, with no short term hope for things to get much better. The recent own goals only made a bad situation worse, and in many European countries things are looking quite bad. Lockdowns are once again the order of the day in many places, most notably Germany, and yet the situation is getting rapidly worse, in some places reaching crisis proportions.

Publication Date: 25 March 2021

Publication Site: The Zvi

Why reopening US schools is so complicated

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/05/1020304/reopening-us-schools-complicated/

Excerpt:

The US can look to Europe for how this played out: European countries tried in-person learning last fall but began closing schools as B.1.1.7 swept through the continent. By December, countries including the Netherlands and Germany had shut down their schools in the face of rising case numbers. The CDC says it may need to update school reopening guidelines in light of new information about variants. 

This task is made more difficult because tracking the spread of variants in the US is tough right now. Compared with other countries, it has very few labs doing this work, and while more funding will help, Friedrich says there will still be a gap.

Author(s): Mia Sato

Publication Date: 5 March 2021

Publication Site: MIT Technology Review

Flood of Cash Pushes Borrowing Costs to Unusual Lows in Europe

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/flood-of-cash-pushes-borrowing-costs-to-unusual-lows-in-europe-11612780202

Excerpt:

Italy’s Enel SpA, one of Europe’s biggest electricity producers, has short-term commercial paper that recently offered an annualized yield of minus 0.61%, according to FactSet: That is 0.11 percentage point lower than the ECB’s deposit rate of minus 0.5%.

When interest rates are negative, borrowers pay back less than they were lent when their debt comes due. At Enel’s rate, if it borrowed $100 for a year, it would pay back $99.39. For the lender, in this case the money-market funds that buy commercial paper, the opposite is true. They get back less money.

“It took a couple of years for clients to get their heads around the idea that they’d have to pay to leave money in a safe spot,” said Kim Hochfeld, global head of State Street’s cash business. State Street’s EUR Liquidity LVNAV Fund — worth 6.6 billion euros, equivalent to $7.9 billion — yields minus 0.68% after fees, but that compares with total costs on large bank deposits of up to 1%, she added.

Author(s): Paul J. Davies

Publication Date: 8 February 2021

Publication Site: Wall Street Journal

Reliance on Social Insurance Tax Revenue in Europe

Mary Pat Campbell
Reliance on Social Insurance Tax Revenue in Europe

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Excerpt:

A recent report on tax revenue sources shows that social insurance taxes—also referred to as social security contributions or payroll taxes—are an important revenue source for European governments. Social insurance taxes, as opposed to individual income taxes, are usually levied at a flat rate. The revenue is generally used to fund specific social programs, such as unemployment insurance, health insurance, and old age insurance.

In 2019 (the most recent data available), social insurance taxes were the second largest tax revenue source in European OECD countries, at an average of 29.5 percent of total tax revenue. Only consumption taxes were on average a larger source of tax revenue, at 32.4 percent.

Author(s): Elke Asen

Publication Date: 25 February 2021

Publication Site: Tax Foundation

Covid-19’s second wave has devastated eastern European countries

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/02/15/covid-19s-second-wave-has-devastated-eastern-european-countries

Graphic:

Excerpt:

In the spring, as the virus ravaged western Europe, countries in the former eastern bloc quickly introduced border controls and lockdowns, and were largely spared. Belgium, Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden accounted for almost all of the continent’s deaths. Each suffered a monthly excess-mortality rate of at least 12 people per 100,000 (averaged from March to May). The country in eastern Europe that got closest was Belarus, which recorded a monthly rate of 8 per 100,000, after imposing almost no restrictions on daily life. Others were markedly lower.

Publication Date: 15 February 2021

Publication Site: The Economist

Tracking covid-19 excess deaths across countries

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker

Graphic:

Excerpt:

At the same time that covid-19 was devastating New York, cities in western Europe were also suffering severe outbreaks. Britain, Spain, Italy and Belgium have some of the highest national excess-death rates in the world, after adjusting for the size of their populations. France and Portugal locked down comparatively early, given the number of positive tests at the time. However, a second wave of covid-19 in winter has caused excess mortality to rise again across the region. (Some countries also recorded a small spike of non-covid fatalities during a heat wave in August.)

Date Accessed: 16 February 2021

Publication Site: The Economist