UK ‘overestimates’ death toll from coronavirus: study

Britain ordered an urgent review on Friday of how coronavirus deaths are counted after a study suggested that health authorities are overestimating the number by counting people who died long after recovering.

More than 45,000 deaths have been recorded in patients who tested positive for COVID-19 in Britain, and many more died without testing, making the country’s outbreak the most deadly in Europe.

But an article from the Oxford University Center for Evidence-Based Medicine revealed a “statistical flaw” in the way the public health agency in England collects the data.

Authors Yoon K Loke and Carl Heneghan said that in collecting death data, Public Health England simply checks its list of laboratory-confirmed cases with a central death registry to see if they are still alive.

“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,” they wrote.

They suggested that this could explain variations in England’s daily toll and why deaths there have not decreased in the same way as in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, which collect their own data.

Under this approach, “no one with COVID in England can recover from their illness,” the article said, and the maximum death toll will include each of the 292,000 people who have had the virus.

“It is time to correct this statistical error that leads to an excessive exaggeration of deaths associated with COVID,” he said, recommending that only deaths within 21 days of a positive test be included in the figures.

In response, Health Secretary Matt Hancock asked Public Health England to urgently review the way it reports deaths “with the aim of providing greater clarity on the number of COVID-19 related deaths,” he said. a spokesman.

However, the daily updated coronavirus number is only one way to measure deaths.

Britain fares just as badly when counting “excess deaths” during the outbreak, a measure that includes people who died undiagnosed or as a result of virus mitigation efforts, such as canceling routine surgery .

The Office for National Statistics says 54,000 more people died in England and Wales this year as of July 3 than the five-year average for that period.

© 2020 AFP