UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock has ordered an “urgent review” of how Public Health England (PHE) calculates the numbers of deaths from coronavirus. It comes after two UK-based scientists highlighted the serious flaw in PHE statistics.
Hancock requested an investigation on Friday after confirmation that Covid-19 mortality figures for England include people who tested positive for the deadly virus months before dying. However, in other UK nations, such as Scotland and Northern Ireland, they only include deaths in their daily count if someone died within 28 days of testing for the disease.
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The critical difference in how deaths are recorded may explain why the death toll in England has remained higher than its neighboring nations.
Follow a surprising article published Thursday by the University of East Anglia professor Yoon K Loke and Carl Heneghan, professor of evidence-based medicine at the University of Oxford.
Analysis by the two scientific statisticians showed that PHE has been recording the deaths of people who previously tested positive for the disease as a death from coronavirus, regardless of whether they had fully recovered from the virus before dying.
A patient who tested positive, but has been successfully treated and discharged from the hospital, will still count as a Covid death, even if he had a heart attack or was hit by a bus three months later.
In their damning assessment, the couple insisted that it was “time to fix this statistical error that leads to excessive exaggeration of COVID-associated deaths.”
These Covid-19 deaths specifically refer to people who have died in a hospital. It is still unclear how many deaths in the community may have been recorded in this way.
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It comes as the latest UK National Bureau of Statistics (ONS) figures released on Friday show the death toll involving Covid-19 breaking the 50,000 barrier.
Between March 1 and June 30, there were 50,335 coronavirus deaths in England and Wales. 46,736 of those deaths had Covid-19 assigned as the underlying cause of death. The ONS data is not based on the same apparent anomaly as the PHE figures.
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