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England to revise DOWN its Covid-19 death toll by up to 10 percent after bizarre 'counting mishap':
Public Health England [(PHE)] currently counts the deaths of all people who have tested positive for Covid-19 among the coronavirus fatality total whether their death was related to the disease or not, an error which was noted in July, prompting the suspension of the daily death toll and an "urgent review" of protocol.
In other words, as many as 4,170 fatalities could be wiped off England's current Covid-19 death toll of 41,686.
According to reports in UKmedia, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Matt Hancock will bring all coronavirus fatality reporting in line with Scotland and Northern Ireland public health models, wherein a death is marked as Covid-19-related only if it occurs within 28 days of a positive test.
[...]
In England, of all deaths that occurred up to 24 July (registered up 1 August), 49,017 involved #COVID19. For the same period, @DHSCgovuk reported 41,143 COVID-19 deaths https://t.co/hKH0tTRb2W
— Office for National Statistics (ONS) (@ONS) August 4, 2020
If the system is not updated, the total of roughly 265,000 confirmed cases in England would all eventually be counted as Covid-19 fatalities regardless of the actual cause of death.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by kazzie on Sunday August 09 2020, @08:02AM (4 children)
In England's case (as alluded to in TFA), they've been counting the death of who's had a positive test as being a Covid-related death. Even if they tested positive back in April, recovered, and then died of something else last week.
That system might have been fit for purpose whe were still at the start or peak of the outbreak, but it's absurd to keep doing that now that we're in the long tail.
Other nations in the UK (Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland) sensibly decided to limit that window, so a death was only counted as Covid-related if it ocurred within four weeks of a positive test.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Sunday August 09 2020, @08:03AM
Argh, tag fault: there should have bean an ”anyone" in that first paragraph.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Sunday August 09 2020, @12:16PM (2 children)
Except that in the UK it is a doctor (your regular one if you die at home, or a hospital one if there) who enters the cause of death on a Death Certificate. If they are just putting down "Covid-19" because they have a record that you tested + for it back in April then they are being very lazy or incompetent. And they would have to know even less about medicine than I do to put down "Covid-19" for a corpse that had been dragged out of a car accident with its head smashed in.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2020, @04:30PM
I heard about a guy who fell into the Mississippi river and got eaten by a catfish, then during the autopsy he tested positive for covid. Even George Floyd tested positive at autopsy.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Sunday August 09 2020, @04:38PM
I doubt that they"re putting that as a single cause of death: many people are dying because of (e.g.) respiratory failure rather than the viral infection itself. That's why the details being collected are deaths involving Covid-19 [ons.gov.uk]. As TFA explains, England were including deaths that ocurred months after an individual recovered from Covid-19, where the other three nations weren't. And they've now gone back and weeded out a lot of these deaths from thier running total.
There may be other miscounts being resolved too: the UK Government (and the only body collating figures for England) stopped releasing figures [itv.com] last month, and I'm sure that they stopped giving running totals even earlier when they realised many deaths were being double-counted (though I can't find a convenient link atm).
I'm only paying passing attention to the English figures, however, as I'm concentrating on my local (Welsh) figures.