Matt Hancock today ordered a review into how Covid-19 deaths are counted in England amid suspicions that they might have been over-reported.
The Health Secretary was said to be “furious” at the way the figures have been compiled through Public Health England.
PHE does not put a time limit in its methodology which means that someone who tested positive for coronavirus many months ago and died of another suspected cause would be counted in the daily death toll announced by the Government.
This figure in England has remained strikingly higher than in some other European countries, at 417 in the past week, and 530 the previous week.
A source said: “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.”
Academics at the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine believe “one reason” for the higher fatality numbers in England is a “flaw in the way PHE compiles ‘out of hospital’ deaths data”. Other countries put a time limit on linking deaths to Covid; Scotland’s is 28 days since a positive test.
A PHE source said: “This is a new and emerging illness. We don’t know the long-term implications that is why we are not putting a cut-off point in counting deaths.”
Even if government figures are an over-count, other ways of counting Covid fatalities show the country has suffered terribly from the disease, with excess deaths put at about 60,000 during the first wave.
