BBC England and Wales are headlining this but BBC Scotland is not. Perhaps this is why. – excess deaths during the worst of the pandemic, March 2020 to February 2022, were nearly twice as high in England and 20% higher in Wales, revealed in the above archived document for excess deaths and in this on the overall death rate:

The Scottish Government took a significantly different approach to extending NPIs in September and October 2020 at a time when it is suggested that there was a delay in the UK Government acting.

12. In this context, a key question that can be asked of the current devolution framework is, did it help save lives? This is a complex question, but we can begin to answer it by considering the Age-standardised Mortality Rates (ASMRs) for the four nations, across the period of the pandemic. Age-standardised Mortality Rates are a better measure of mortality than numbers of deaths, as they account for the population size and age structure and provide more reliable comparisons between groups or over time.

13. When considering the outcome of the pandemic across the four nations, Sir Iain Diamond (in his additional witness statement M2/03/UKSA; 11/09/2023) detailed that England had the highest Age-standardised Mortality Rates for deaths involving COVID-19 of the four nations, 145.0 per 100,000 people followed by Wales (144.6), Northern Ireland (130.7) and Scotland (124.9), between March 2020 and February 2022.4

14. The expert report provided to the Inquiry by Professor Hale also detailed international comparison of deaths per capita noting that over the three-year period from 2020 to 2022, England experienced the 19th highest number of deaths per capita on a global scale and was 15th amongst European countries while Scotland experienced the 38th highest number of deaths on the global scale, and the 27th among European nations.

15. Furthermore, these outcomes occurred in spite of the relatively high levels of poverty-related ill health in Scotland, which might have been expected, everything else being equal, to result in a higher, rather than lower, Age-standardised Mortality Rate. https://covid19.public-inquiry.uk/documents/module-2-closing-statement-on-behalf-of-the-scottish-ministers/

Professor Thomas Hale – Associate Professor in Global Public Policy, Blavatnik School of Government; Fellow of St Antony’s College – https://www.ox.ac.uk/news-and-events/find-an-expert/professor-thomas-hale

20 per 100 000 fewer deaths during the pandemic is more than 1 000 lives saved by Nicola Sturgeon and her team.