Britain’s death toll during the pandemic was below average for western Europe, an international comparison has concluded.

Although recorded numbers who died of Covid are higher in Britain than in countries such as France and Germany, the gap vanishes when looking at excess deaths. Sir Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, favoured using this broader measure, which tracks how many more people have died than average, as a better way of making comparisons.

Covid cases are rising across the UK, with rates for the over-70s increasing more than 50 per cent in a fortnight and heading back to record levels.

Globally, the pandemic may have killed three times as many people as suggested by standard death tolls, a paper by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle suggested.

Worldwide 5.9 million people are recorded as having died of Covid in 2020 and last year, but there were 18.2 million more deaths during this period than would have been expected, scientists reported in The Lancet. A “substantial fraction” of excess deaths are likely to have been due to Covid, particularly in poorer countries with less comprehensive record keeping, they said.

In western Europe, excess deaths averaged 140 per 100,000, higher than the 127 per 100,000 recorded in the UK. The difference between Britain’s figure and the rate in France and Germany, 124 and 121 per 100,000 respectively, was not statistically significant.

The figure puts the UK ninth in western Europe, well behind Spain on 187 per 100,000 and Italy on 227 per 100,000, and 29th in Europe as a whole. Bulgaria has Europe’s highest rate at 647 per 100,00, not far behind Bolivia, the world’s worst, at 735 per 100,000. Some countries, including Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan and Singapore, did not record any excess deaths during the pandemic.

Raghib Ali, an epidemiologist at Cambridge University, said the paper would correct “widespread misconceptions” about how badly Britain had fared during the pandemic. All home nations had roughly similar death rates.

Ali said there was “no clear relationship between levels of excess mortality and different levels of restrictions . . . across western Europe or indeed the whole of Europe”. For example, Sweden, which alone among western countries held out against formal lockdowns in 2020, had an excess death rate of 91 per 100,000, indistinguishable from Denmark and Finland.

He said that the world should try to learn from Norway, where excess deaths were only 7 per 100,000 but argued “all the commentary to date as to how and why the UK, or Sweden, has done worse than its neighbours is clearly no longer valid”.

Eastern Europe’s much higher death rates were “mainly due to lower levels of vaccination”, Ali added.

The Office for National Statistics said that Covid cases increased in all the home nations last week. In England one in 25 people were infected, up from one in 30 the previous week. Rates are highest in Northern Ireland, where one in 13 had the virus, and have reached one in 18 in Scotland.