The British government has suspended the publication of the daily number of covid-19 deaths over concerns that serious “statistical flaws” might have caused inaccurate data.
The pause in its publication was decided when health secretary Matt Hancock ordered an urgent review into the figures after scientists exposed serious oddities in the way Public Health England (PHE) counted the overall covid death toll.
PHE has essentially been keeping the death meter running by counting people who die of any cause at any time after previously testing positive for Covid.
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RT reports:Concerns over potential critical flaws in how Covid-19 deaths are counted were recently brought to light in a damning article by University of East Anglia professor Yoon K Loke and Carl Heneghan, a professor of evidence-based medicine at Oxford University.
Their study noticed that PHE have been regularly looking for Covid-positive patients on the NHS database, simply checking if they were alive or not. This method did not consider any time that passed since the coronavirus test, nor whether the patient had recovered in the hospital and was “discharged to the community.”
After this, any person who has tested positive but was successfully treated and sent back home, “will still be counted as a Covid death, even if they had a heart attack or were run over by a bus three months later.”
The statistical anomaly could explain why England’s death toll was considerably higher than those of its neighbors. Currently, UK government figures put the number of “Covid-associated deaths” in England at 40,640 – the lion’s share of the 45,233 fatalities recorded across Britain.
