By Ben Kerrigan-
Nearly 3,000 extra Covid-19 deaths have been added to the UK’s official figures after the discovery of a data error, the UK Agency have today discovered.
The overall number of people who have died within 28 days of testing positive for coronavirus rose by an extra 2,714 on Wednesday, in addition to 233 newly reported deaths, taking the total number of deaths in the UK within 28 days of a positive test to 169,095.
The extra numbers were said to have been added in error. In July, 2020, the British government changed the system of determining Covid-19 deaths after the former Health Secretary, Matt Hancock announced a review into how Public Health England counts deaths.
Yoon K Loke and Carl Heneghan, of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford University, at the time wrote in a blogpost: “It seems that PHE regularly looks for people on the NHS database who have ever tested positive, and simply checks to see if they are still alive or not. PHE does not appear to consider how long ago the Covid test result was, nor whether the person has been successfully treated in hospital and discharged to the community.”
A Department of Health and Social Care source summed this up as: “You could have been tested positive in February, have no symptoms, then be hit by a bus in July and you’d be recorded as a Covid death.”
Covid deaths were later calculated to only be official if they occur within 28 days of testing positive for the virus. That framework has recently been questioned by researchers because it suggests that anyone who tests positive for Covid-19 but gets hit by a bus on the 25th day can be put down as having died from the virus.
Legitimate covid deaths will have to have been the result of covid , which the conclusion being that the death would not have occurred had the victim not caught covid.
The UK Health Security Agency said: “Due to a data processing error, a number of people who died within 28 days of a positive Covid-19 test were not reported in a timely manner.”
The 2,714 deaths, all of which occurred in England this year, were added retrospectively to the government’s coronavirus dashboard on Wednesday evening.
The revision to the figures narrows the gap slightly between the government’s preferred death toll, based only on people who have died within 28 days of testing positive, and the number of people who have had Covid-19 recorded on their death certificate, which is published by the Office for National Statistics and stands at just over 190,000.
Both measures of Covid-19 mortality have shown a slight increase in recent weeks in the number of deaths occurring each day in the UK, reflecting the impact of the surge of infections driven by the Omicron variant.
The daily death toll remains well below levels reached during the first and second waves of the virus.