PARIS — In the week of June 22 to June 28, deaths in French homes rose 91 per cent compared with the week before. The count of bodies visible in the news, people who collapsed at beaches, who died in cars, who arrived in emergency rooms with hyperthermia, was a few dozen. The official figure, released Thursday by France’s health minister, is 2,025.
Belgium put its count at roughly 1,200. The Netherlands confirmed approximately 480. Together, France, Belgium and the Netherlands report that the June heatwave killed at least 3,700 people, with health authorities in all three countries warning the final tally will be higher. The numbers were released separately by each country’s public health agency and were reported by Reuters on Thursday.
French Health Minister Stephanie Rist announced the 2,025 excess-death figure and her ministry added that “mortality will be higher than these initial figures suggest.” The 2,025 figure captures only the first analysis of provisional death registrations, and those registrations take weeks to stabilise. In France, the sharpest increase fell among people over 45, a demographic pattern consistent with every previous European heatwave, and one that does not appear in raw incident counts because the most vulnerable often die at home.
The Belgian figure of roughly 1,200 is the one its health ministry labelled “unprecedented in our country.” Belgium had not previously recorded excess mortality at this scale from heat. Among the Belgian dead, 530 were aged 85 and older. One hundred and eighty were under 65, a subset that does not fit the usual profile of heat mortality and raises direct questions about Belgium’s cooling infrastructure outside nursing homes and residential care facilities.
The Netherlands recorded approximately 480 excess deaths, concentrated primarily among people over 80. Dutch authorities confirmed the figures without the “unprecedented” framing used by Belgium, though the Netherlands had not reached similar levels before. France’s note that its figures are still provisional applies equally to the Belgian and Dutch counts.
What Thursday’s numbers do not include is every other country that was hit. Spain’s Carlos III Health Institute, which reported 327 heat deaths in a single week during the heatwave’s peak, had not released an excess-mortality analysis as of Thursday. England reached its hottest June day on record during the same period and its ambulance services hit historic demand levels, yet official excess death figures for England have not been published. If Spain and the United Kingdom produce excess-death estimates comparable to their visible mortality counts, the continental total is likely to pass 5,000.
Excess mortality is not the same as a confirmed heat death. It is the statistical gap between how many people die in a given period and how many would have died based on historical averages for that time of year. Public health authorities use excess mortality precisely because visible heat deaths, people recorded in emergency logs, reported to police, counted by hospitals, dramatically undercount the real impact. The gap between France’s real-time reports in late June and Thursday’s official figure is roughly 100 to one: visible deaths ran to a few dozen; excess mortality exceeds 2,000.
The heatwave that produced these deaths was itself a product of a specific mechanism. Scientists studying Europe’s June 2026 heat event concluded that a heatwave of this severity was “virtually impossible” without the warming produced by human greenhouse-gas emissions, shifting the framing of climate attribution from “climate change made it worse” to “climate change made it happen at all.” The attribution study, published during the heat itself, found that night temperatures crossed thresholds with no historical precedent on the continent.
For European health systems, the June 2026 heatwave was the second of the summer. A May heat event killed more than 150 people across France and Spain before this one drove the toll past anything previously recorded. The World Health Organisation had warned that European health systems “were never built for this”: the nursing home staffing ratios, hospital capacity thresholds, housing construction standards, and urban cooling infrastructure across the continent were calibrated for a climate that no longer exists. Retrofitting those systems costs money and takes years. The excess deaths are accumulating in the meantime.
Belgium’s “unprecedented” is not just an official adjective. It is a record being set for the first time. When the same record is set again next summer, or the summer after, the framing will likely change, because “unprecedented” requires a baseline that keeps being replaced. France’s 2,025 and Belgium’s 1,200 are what Europe’s June looked like this year. The question the three governments could not answer Thursday is what the July count will add.
