Health Secretary of the UK Matt Hancock has ordered an urgent review into the method of calculating daily coronavirus deaths in England. It was claimed that the way coronavirus deaths are mentioned currently does not take into consideration the fact that some people may have died from a different cause and may have recovered from coronavirus.
The public health England (PHE) confirmed that the number of deaths may have included people who tested positive one or two months before they died. The other nations of the UK only included people in the death records who died within 28 days of being positive. As of now, more than 45,000 people in England have died due to covid19.
The PHE counts people as having died of coronavirus when they die of any reason after being tested positive for the virus. Top academics revealed that even if people have died due to an accident after recovering from coronavirus were counted as covid19 deaths. The method is blamed for the daily coronavirus deaths not dropping in England because people are never treated to have truly recovered from the virus as their deaths regardless of their real reason are being blamed on the virus.
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A pharmacologist at the University of East Anglia Dr. Yoon Loke warned that the method is not a good way for collecting data, PHE chose it due to it being a quick and easy technique and it had a significant impact in the past two months. He added that the number of people dying of the virus may not be reduced to zero for months because there is a long list of elderly people who have recovered from the virus but will die of any other cause.
Dr. Loke discovered the flaws in this method in collaboration with Professor at Oxford University Carl Heneghan. According to him if PHE doesn’t change its method that people in England will never be allowed to recover from this illness as they will be treated as Covid19 death when they will die.
Prime Minister of UK confirmed that the Health Secretary Matt Hancock has ordered PHE to review its method of counting daily coronavirus deaths. PHE has made a number of mistakes which also includes when they stopped tracing and testing at the peak of the covid19 outbreak in England. David Davis, a Tory MP, said PHE had made a complete mess of the coronavirus testing.
While NHS reports thirty to thirty-five deaths per day, PHE records double or more of that amount. This is because after being tested positive if a person dies of any reason it would be treated as covid19 related death. Figures from PHE showed today that less than 10 percent of the covid19 deaths in England happened after more than 28 days of the person being tested positive and almost half of them were treated as having covid19 as their main cause of death.
This might be the reason why the daily coronavirus deaths in England are much higher than in other UK nations. Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland only include people, who have died within 28 days of testing positive, in coronavirus related deaths. But this does in no way mean that most of the coronavirus deaths in England were counting errors.
According to the statisticians, the death registrations should be looked at which may pick up people dying of coronavirus who were never tested positive by a lab test. And when the figures are given a closer look even if people died of other causes, England has one of the highest numbers of deaths since the beginning of the pandemic among the developed economies.