An urgent review has been ordered into how daily coronavirus death figures are calculated after it was claimed the current method did not account for people recovering from COVID-19.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock has asked for the examination of Public Health England's (PHE) data - said by researchers to include a "statistical anomaly" by which "no one can ever recover from COVID-19 in England".
According to government figures, there have been 45,119 COVID-19 associated deaths across the UK.
However, there are now concerns that death tally could be inaccurate due to the way coronavirus deaths are recorded in England.
A government source confirmed that PHE's current method of calculation means if a person was previously diagnosed with COVID-19 but subsequently died of unrelated causes, their death would still be counted as part of PHE's daily coronavirus death tally.
It is understood a different methodology for counting coronavirus deaths is used in Scotland and Northern Ireland to the one used in England.
The review ordered by Mr Hancock aims to sort out the issue and establish the impact on the UK's overall death tally.
A recent article published by the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (CEBM), based at Oxford University, described the "statistical anomaly" which means that "no one can ever recover from COVID-19 in England".
"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," said the CEBM article's authors Professor Yoon Loke, from the University of East Anglia, and Professor Carl Heneghan, from Oxford University.
"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.
"Anyone who has tested COVID positive but subsequently died at a later date of any cause will be included on the PHE COVID death figures.
"By this PHE definition, no one with COVID in England is allowed to ever recover from their illness.
"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."
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CEBM said this would explain why daily death figures vary substantially from day to day, with 16 new deaths reported in the UK on 6 July but then 155 reported the next day.
With more than 250,000 people having so far tested positive for coronavirus in England, CEBM suggested PHE's definition of daily death figures means "that everyone who has ever had COVID at any time must die with COVID too".
They called for PHE to instead define COVID-related deaths as those that occur within three weeks of a positive test result for coronavirus.
"It's time to fix this statistical flaw that leads to an over-exaggeration of COVID-associated deaths," they added.
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMiiAFodHRwczovL25ld3Muc2t5LmNvbS9zdG9yeS9jb3JvbmF2aXJ1cy1oZWFsdGgtc2VjcmV0YXJ5LW1hdHQtaGFuY29jay1vcmRlcnMtdXJnZW50LXJldmlldy1pbnRvLXB1YmxpYy1oZWFsdGgtZW5nbGFuZC1kZWF0aC1kYXRhLTEyMDMwMzky0gGMAWh0dHBzOi8vbmV3cy5za3kuY29tL3N0b3J5L2FtcC9jb3JvbmF2aXJ1cy1oZWFsdGgtc2VjcmV0YXJ5LW1hdHQtaGFuY29jay1vcmRlcnMtdXJnZW50LXJldmlldy1pbnRvLXB1YmxpYy1oZWFsdGgtZW5nbGFuZC1kZWF0aC1kYXRhLTEyMDMwMzky?oc=5
2020-07-17 09:33:45Z
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