Monday April 27th


There are now a lot of statistics flying about and this is causing a lot of confusion. Let me try to pick through this.
The Government use deaths in hospital only. These are issued on a daily basis but are not, for technical reasons, the number of deaths in the last 24 hours as they have been widely reported in the press.
The figure as of yesterday, today's figure has not been put on their website, is 20,732.
The figure does not include deaths in care homes or deaths at home.
Every Tuesday the ONS release data on place of death. Last week that data indicated that around 20% of deaths from Covid-19 were not occurring in hospitals. Adding that proportion to the hospital figure gives a total of 24,710.
Meanwhile, the FT using daily death certificate data plus a model based on excess deaths compared to the previous 5 years, give us a figure of 41,102.


Total deaths from Covid-19, United Kingdom

Which of these figures is correct?

None of them. The Government figure clearly leaves out deaths occurring outside of hospitals.
My estimate is based on data released last week which showed that up to 20th April around 80% of death certificates were issued to people who had died in hospital. However, it can take up to 5 weeks for a death certificate to be issued, so these figures are likely to change tomorrow.
The FT figures use a fairly sophisticated modelling which may or may not prove to be correct.


How is the testing going?

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