The UK’s Health Minister Matt Hancock has called for an urgent review into how Covid-19 deaths have been recorded in England after University of Oxford Professor Carl Heneghan spotted a “huge variation” in the numbers of daily deaths reported in England the BBC reports.
Prof. Heneghan reported that NHS England currently reports 30-35 deaths per day but Public Health England (PHE) data often shows double that or more.
“By this PHE definition, no one with Covid in England is allowed to ever recover from their illness,” Prof Heneghan says.
So far there have been over 40,000 deaths linked to the Covid-19 virus in England, but this is counting people who were diagnosed with the disease but may not have actually died due to it.
A note on the British government’s Covid-19 guidance website reads:
“Currently the daily deaths measure counts all people who have tested positive for coronavirus and since died, with no cut-off between time of testing and date of death.
“There have been claims that the lack of cut-off may distort the current daily deaths number.”
According to the BBC this could explain why the daily death toll in England has remained higher than in other UK nations.
UK government officials have said the publication of daily death figures will be paused while the issue was “resolved”.
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