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The government still does not know when a “statistical flaw” that over-counted the number of people killed by coronavirus in the UK will be fixed, HuffPost UK can reveal.
A review into the anomaly, ordered by health secretary Matt Hancock earlier this month, is under way but there is “no fixed date yet” for when it will report back.
Public Health England (PHE)’s current methodology means people who test positive for the virus but recover and later die of unrelated causes are still identified as Covid-19 deaths.
In a blog entitled “Why no one can ever recover from Covid-19 in England – a statistical anomaly”, Professors Yoon Loke, from the University of East Anglia, and Carl Heneghan, from the University of Oxford, first revealed the problem, and said more robust data was needed.
Health secretary Matt Hancock ordered an urgent review into the way PHE counts fatalities.
The news was seized upon by some as evidence that the severity of the pandemic was being exaggerated, but this does not seem to be the case – more reliable figures such as the number of “excess deaths” reported by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) clearly demonstrate the heavy toll of the virus in the UK.
The most recent excess figures data show there were 58,000 “excess deaths” in England and Wales between March and the week ending July 17 – that is, the number of people who have died this year over and above the average for the last five years.
Of the deaths registered by July 17, 51,264 actually mentioned Covid-19 on the death certificate, accounting for almost 15% of all deaths registered in 2020.
The PHE figures are lower, despite the overcounting in the “statistical flaw”, because they only record patients who have tested positive for coronavirus – whereas many people, particularly early in the pandemic, died without being tested.