July 17, 2020

expert reaction to the way COVID-19 deaths are recorded in England

Public Health England (PHE) have acknowledged that COVID-19 deaths are recorded in a different way in England compared to the rest of the UK.

Prof Sheila Bird, Formerly Programme Leader, MRC Biostatistics Unit, University of Cambridge, said:

“For England & Wales, authoritative figures on COVID-mention deaths (bar those referred to coroners and not yet registered) are reported weekly by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Tuesday’s report accounted for 50,548 COVID-mention deaths registered by 3 July 2020 with ONS for England & Wales.

“By comparison, the daily cumulative count of CONFIRMED COVID deaths is something of an undercount. I think it important that in reporting on COVID-19 deaths, journalists set the daily count against the larger backdrop of the latest ONS count (as above) along with the cumulative count of excess deaths from early March (also from ONS). Few news reports report all three –perhaps because the ONS’s counts are released only weekly. However, they give a more complete picture on a weekly basis than does the daily reporting of a subset of COVID-mention deaths. The daily tallies are themselves subject to reporting-delay…

“Public Health England may, in effect, be following-up a national virtual cohort, namely: England’s cohort of persons who ever tested RT-PCR positive for SARS-CoV-2. Follow-up for all-cause and cause-specific mortality in distinct epochs of time after swab-date is prudent. Indeed, this type of record-linkage study for the short and longer-term fatal effects of COVID-19 disease has considerable merit in its own right.

“The problem comes if PHE does not make clear whether the deaths they report are COVID-mention on death certification; and in which epoch of follow-up (1^st 4-weeks, next 8-weeks, weeks 12-26 weeks after swab-date) the death occurred.”

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/coronavirus-covid-19-information-for-the-public

All our previous output on this subject can be seen at this weblink:

www.sciencemediacentre.org/tag/covid-19

Declared interests

Prof Sheila Bird:  “Prof Bird leads for the Royal Statistical Society on the need for legislation to end the late registration of deaths in England, Wales and Northern Ireland”