Urgent review into UK’s coronavirus death toll as PHE accused of counting people who’ve died of natural causes
HEALTH secretary Matt Hancock has ordered an urgent review after Public Health England were accused of miscalculating the coronavirus death toll.
Deaths from coronavirus might not be as high as the current 70 a day after PHE was accused of inflating the toll by counting people who have died of natural causes.
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Health Secretary Mr Hancock has called an urgent review into PHE for the way they counted the numbers after scientists accused them of bungling the death toll.
The Government has called a review into the way numbers were counted after Britain has suffered from the highest number of deaths in Europe.
A Government source told the Evening Standard: "We noticed that hospital deaths were falling but community deaths were up and wondered why.
"It turns out you could have been tested positive in February, recovered, then hit by a bus in July and you'd be recorded as a covid death".
Experts from Oxford University have suggested that just 40 people a day are dying from coronavirus in all settings.
Yesterday, 66 deaths from Covid-19 were recorded, bringing the horrifying total to 45,119.
Earlier this week the Office for National Statistics (ONS) published deaths registered in England and Wales in the week to July 3.
This revealed that 532 of the 9,140 total mentioned the coronavirus on death certificates.
This indicates a slide from a peak of 1,272 deaths on April 8.
Experts at the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine said the daily number of deaths has fallen considerably with 64 occurring on June 30 and 37 on July 1.
Analysis by Professor Carl Henegan and Professor Jason Oke reveals that one of the deaths included in the total this week actually took place on April 27.
This is while three took place in May and two in June.
The total number of deaths in all settings is approximately 40 per day
Prof Carl Henegan and Prof Jason Oke
So far in the UK more than 45,000 people have died from the coronavirus, according to figures from the Department of Health and Social Care.
However Profs Henegan and Oke have now said figures from Public Health England are not reliable.
They said: "It seems the PHE regularly looks for people on the NHS database who have ever tested positive, and simply checks to see if they are still alive or not.
"PHE does not appear to consider how long ago the COVID test result was, nor whether the person has been successfully treated in hospital and discharged to the community."
They said anyone who tested positive for coronavirus and then died of any cause would be included in the death count.
They said in the report: “What has become apparent in recent weeks is the growing disparity between the numbers released by ONS and those reported by Public Health England which are widely disseminated in the media.
“The total number of Covid-19 deaths in England according to ONS for 3rd July is 48,154 whereas the equivalent total announced on the 4th by PHE was 39,626.
“The PHE figures also vary substantially from day to day. For example, 16 new deaths were announced on 6th July, but the following day, 152 were reported.”
At the start of the pandemic, officials cautioned the public not to read too much in to any single day's death toll because often there could be "bottle necks" from delayed reporting.
The government later introduced a seven-day rolling average which it claimed delivered a more accurate representation.
The experts said there is a clear disparity between the data sets being released.
The moving average from PHE for June 30 is 103, this is more than data produced by the ONS for June 30 and July 1 combined.
They added: “The moving average is overlaid on to the ONS figures to show the PHE figures average has been consistently higher than ONS for some time.
“A similar analysis of the English hospital data by date of occurrence shows 25 deaths for June 30.
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“As this is 60 per cent of Covid deaths in hospitals, we can surmise that the total number of deaths in all settings is approximately 40 per day, much closer to the ONS numbers.”
They said that it’s best to use ONS data and NHS England data to understand the true scope.
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