{"id":211899,"date":"2020-08-13T06:55:18","date_gmt":"2020-08-13T06:55:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=211899"},"modified":"2020-08-14T07:03:15","modified_gmt":"2020-08-14T07:03:15","slug":"daily-covid-death-count-could-be-scrapped","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=211899","title":{"rendered":"Daily covid death count could be scrapped"},"content":{"rendered":"

Anna Mikhailova \u2013 The Telegraph Aug 9, 2020<\/strong><\/h1>\n

The official Covid-19 daily death toll<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/a> may never be brought back following an investigation into\u00a0Public\u00a0Health\u00a0England’s method of counting it, the Telegraph understands.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Matt Hancock. Click to enlarge<\/p><\/div>\n

The conclusions of the review, which was ordered by Matt Hancock after\u00a0it emerged officials were “over-exaggerating\u201d deaths from the virus,\u00a0are expected this week.<\/span><\/p>\n

One expected recommendation would be to stop daily reporting altogether and move to a weekly official death toll instead, a government source said on Sunday night.<\/span><\/p>\n

The review\u00a0has been \u201clooking at all options,\u201d the source said.<\/span><\/p>\n

On July 17, the\u00a0Health\u00a0Secretary asked PHE<\/strong><\/span><\/a> to urgently investigate the way daily death statistics had been reported, leading PHE to say it was \u201cpausing\u201d the daily release.<\/span><\/p>\n

It came after Oxford University\u00a0experts revealed a significant proportion of the daily out-of-hospital death toll relates to patients who recovered from the virus weeks or months earlier.<\/span><\/p>\n

Under the previous system, anyone who has ever tested positive for the virus in England was automatically counted as a coronavirus death when they died, even if the death was from a car accident<\/a><\/strong><\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n

By contrast, Scotland and Wales operate a cut-off threshold of 28 days after a positive test, after which a death is not assumed to be virus-related.<\/span><\/p>\n

The official data has continued to release data on cases where people have tested positive for the virus. As of Sunday, 310,825 people have tested positive for coronavirus, according to PHE.<\/span><\/p>\n

PHE\u2019s death count was prominently used in the daily Downing Street press conferences.\u00a0It is understood that, once the review on its methodology is concluded, the official death figures will start being routinely published on Twitter<\/strong> <\/a><\/span>and the government\u2019s website<\/a><\/strong><\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Doing so on a weekly rather than daily basis could help improve accuracy for future death counts, but could also make it harder to draw comparisons in the event of a second wave of the virus.<\/span><\/p>\n

Prof Carl Heneghan, director at Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine<\/strong><\/span><\/a>, has\u00a0called for a cut-off period for the way the death toll is calculated in\u00a0England\u00a0of 21 days.<\/span><\/p>\n

He said at the time the review was launched: “We think it’s incredibly important, so you understand exactly what’s going on, that you say these are the deaths that occurred within a certain time point, and then you can understand the trends and that will help the media report accurately to the\u00a0public\u00a0what’s going on.”<\/span><\/p>\n

Meanwhile Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, reportedly holds the view that excess deaths are the best measure to use, which will be unaffected by the\u00a0PHE review.<\/span><\/p>\n

PHE had defended its previous approach saying there is “no\u00a0World\u00a0Health\u00a0Organisation<\/strong><\/span><\/a>-agreed method” for recording deaths from coronavirus.<\/span><\/p>\n

Dr Susan Hopkins, PHE\u2019s incident director, has said: “Although it may seem straightforward, there is no WHO agreed method of counting deaths from Covid-19. In\u00a0England, we count all those that have died who had a positive Covid-19 test at any point, to ensure our data are as complete as possible.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

PHE declined to comment ahead of the publication of the review.<\/span><\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Officials accused of “over-exaggerating\u201d the number of deaths, after it emerges that Covid-19 was listed as the cause of death for anyone with symptoms. Even if they died from something else like crash injuries or cancer<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[105],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-211899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-coronavirus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=211899"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211899\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":211902,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211899\/revisions\/211902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=211899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=211899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=211899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}