recover from their illness,” Carl Heneghan, from Oxford University, and Yoon Loke, from East Anglia University, wrote. “A patient who has tested positive but been successfully treated and discharged from hospital will still be counted as a Covid death even if they had a heart attack, or are run over by a bus three months later.”…
It is unlikely that reassessing this methodology will substantially affect the death count from the height of the pandemic. It does mean, however, that it is now essentially impossible for England to reach zero deaths until the point at which everyone who has had Covid-19 has died.
“PHE’s definition of the daily death figures means that everyone who has ever had Covid at any time must die with Covid too,” the researchers wrote….
Mr Hancock is concerned that the system will create an artificial spike in care home deaths in the coming months, given the relatively short life expectancies of many residents.
Initially the review is expected to attempt to remeasure English deaths using the Scottish system. Ultimately, however, it will aim to come up with a more robust estimate of the numbers to have died as a direct result of the virus.
Susan Hopkins of Imperial College London, who sits on a PHE board, said: “Although it may seem straightforward, there is no WHO agreed method of counting the deaths from Covid-19. In England we count all those that have died who had a positive Covid-19 test at any point, to ensure our data is as complete as possible.
That's not complete data…that's wrong data. That's misleading data…
What with Neil Ferguson and his doomsday scenarios, and now this Susan Hopkins, my estimation of Imperial College has not exactly been boosted by recent events.
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