LONDON (HRNW) – Britain has suffered the deadliest outbreak of coronavirus in Europe but a new study suggests the health authorities are overestimating the toll by including people who died long after they recovered.
More than 45,000 deaths have been recorded in patients who tested positive for coronavirus, a grim figure that has sparked accusations that Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government bungled its response.
But an article for the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine published Thursday reveals a statistical anomaly in the way data is gathered by the public health agency in England.
Every time a patient dies, the central register of the state-run National Health Service (NHS) is notified, authors Yoon K Loke and Carl Heneghan note.
They say that in compiling its daily coronavirus toll, Public Health England (PHE) simply checks its list of lab-confirmed cases to see whether they are still alive.
“A patient who has tested positive, but successfully treated and discharged from hospital, 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,” they write.
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