In the week of 22 to 28 June, the arrondissement of Liège recorded 322 deaths. Its median for the same week across the four preceding years is 115.5. That is 2.79 times normal, and of the 371 European districts that have filed a figure for that week and have a baseline of at least 40 deaths a week, no other district is higher.
The Belgian broadcaster RTBF reported the outline of this on 28 July, citing Sciensano, which had found deaths in some arrondissements up 128 per cent. What the national figures do not show is how sharply the same heat sorted between neighbours.
Liège was not where the heat was worst. ERA5 reanalysis puts the district’s peak at 38.4C on 26 June. Paris reached 40.3C two days earlier and 39.8C the day after, and the department of Paris recorded 754 deaths against a 289.5 median — 2.60 times normal, below Liège on a hotter week. The gap between the two ratios is small enough to sit inside the sampling noise of counts this size, so it should not be read as a ranking; what it does establish is that being hotter did not make Paris worse.
The contrast that does hold is with Flanders. Tongeren, forty kilometres north of Liège across the language border, peaked at 36.3C and recorded 45 deaths against a median of 32.5 — 1.39 times. Antwerp reached 37.0C and ran 1.35 times, 245 deaths against 182. A difference of one to two degrees separates them from Liège; a factor of two separates their excess.
The band that did move is continuous and Walloon. Namur ran 2.35 times normal and Mons 2.33. Huy, immediately upriver from Liège in the same province, ran 1.87 times, 43 deaths against 23. Taken as a province, Liège recorded 482 deaths against a median of 204.
The other cluster is the Paris basin. Behind Paris itself come Seine-Saint-Denis at 2.44, Hauts-de-Seine at 2.39, Val-de-Marne at 2.38 and Yvelines at 2.35 — the inner suburbs, in order, all of them above every district outside France and Belgium that has reported.
Two limits belong on all of this. The figures carry Eurostat’s provisional flag, and its own methodological note says weekly death statistics are revised continuously as national statistical institutes resubmit, so the ratios will move. And the coverage is partial: 476 districts from fourteen countries have filed a value for the week with four years of comparable history. Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Switzerland, Greece, Sweden and Ireland have filed none at district level, so this is a ranking of the places that report quickly, not of Europe.
What survives those limits is the shape rather than the ordering. Within the countries that have reported, the June heat week did not kill in proportion to how hot it got. It killed hardest along the Meuse and in the inner Paris suburbs, and comparatively lightly in places that were only a degree or two cooler.