UK Coronavirus Deaths: Different Sets of Numbers

On May 06, UK coronavirus deaths went past 30,000 – if you had depended on the data collated by Johns Hopkins University. And yesterday, they crept to 32,692. 

But just as Boris Johnson (right) confused everybody with his “Stay Alert” advice on Sunday – the same is true for Covid-19 numbers. 

That's because, according to the Guardian, UK deaths had already gone past 40,000. They had turned to The Office for National Statistics for the ‘real’ numbers. 

The ONS on Tuesday put the number of fatalities involving Covid-19 that were registered in England and Wales up to May 09 as 35,044. Adding the latest figures for Scotland and Northern Ireland and more up to date fatalities from the four nations, the total ‘official’ UK death toll now stands at 40,496 (Guardian, May 12, 2020). 

Also yesterday, BBC News had published a piece by their Head of Statistics, Robert Cuffe (right), who asserted that the number of people who died because of Covid-19 is nearly twice as high as the figure we hear announced every day. 

Meaning, the death toll has exceeded more than 50,000! Cuffe had written:

“By May 01, the number of coronavirus deaths announced by the UK government was just over 28,000. 

Looking back at death registrations filed then, the figure is higher: just over 36,000 death certificates mentioned Covid-19. 

The measure preferred by statisticians, counting all deaths above what would be expected, was even higher: more than 50,000”. 

And this bar graph informs us of the death count by three different methods:

“Every day the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) reports on the number of coronavirus deaths that have been reported to it across the UK. 

This is the figure read out at the daily press conference, and the figure used on most international comparison sites. But it only includes deaths of people who test positive for coronavirus. 

That is fine for scientists who want to monitor patterns in the growth of the epidemic precisely: the rate of increase and time spent at the peak are useful measures, says Prof Sylvia Richardson, who is president-elect of the Royal Statistical Society and based at the University of Cambridge. 

But it's a poor measure of the overall death toll because it misses people who never had a test. 

When testing was largely limited to hospitals in the UK, those daily figures were missing most deaths in the community. 

On top of this, different countries use different definitions. For example, England excluded deaths outside hospitals from its daily count until a few weeks ago. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland didn't. And Belgium includes suspected cases of coronavirus in its daily count, which makes their figures look unusually high compared to other countries. 

That makes it hard to do precise like-for-like comparisons between countries, and scientists warn against reading too much into small absolute differences in these daily statistics”.

I find Cuffe's arguments are valid. And I believe the reports by health authorities, not just in the UK but elsewhere, are suspect too.

Therefore, the coronavirus statistics as reported all around the world shouldn’t be taken at face value. At best, the numbers whether of infections and/or deaths are only indications and nothing more than that.