Covid deaths in the UK may have been overestimated because of the way data was collected, a study suggests.
Experts say that many who died early on in the pandemic never tested positive for coronavirus or died of something completely different.
Scientists at the University of Oxford and charity Collateral Global, pored through 800 responses to Freedom of Information requests sent by the public to care homes and medical institutions.
They found that 14 different terms were used to describe someone who died with Covid – including ‘underlying Covid’, ‘involving Covid’, ‘due to Covid’ and ‘died within either 28 or 60 days of a positive test.
Muddying the waters even more, some hospital trusts required a positive test to certify a Covid death, while others did not.
In care homes, doctors certified Covid deaths via video calls, which experts have suggested would have made them assume many people without confirmation.
Many of these homes also failed to mention any underlying health conditions among people who died.
Professor Carl Heneghan, from Oxford University’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, said: ‘Some of those counted as a Covid fatality may never have had the virus. The accuracy of this data is vitally important because it led to lockdowns and restrictions which had huge socio-economic costs.
‘If the death toll has been wrong all along, it will lead to a lack of trust among the public. And if we don’t fix these issues, there’s a chance there will be calls for further lockdowns and restrictions.’
He added: ‘Very few people have thought, “Let’s just check the accuracy”. People have become uncritical, but we have seen policies on the back of this panic. I would like to know why, two years in, the Government isn’t doing more to fix this issue.’
Early last year, audits by the Office for National Statistics suggested roughly 90% of people who died with Covid were killed as a direct result of the virus.
This meant coronavirus was listed as a primary cause of their death certificated, rather than as a contributory factor.
The Collateral Glocal report uncovered more than 1,500 cases across eight UK hospitals where Covid was the only thing listed on the death certificate, the Mail on Sunday reports.
Professor Tom Jefferson, the paper’s co-author, said this would be ‘implausible’ because of how people with underlying conditions are much more likely to die from coronavirus.
A study of 80,000 Covid patients carried out by the University of Edinburgh showed that between March and August 2020, no confirmatory PCR test was carried out in nearly a third of cases.
Does this mean that the number of Covid deaths recorded in the UK were way higher than the true number? No one will ever know for sure now, and the opposite could also be true.
‘We’re not trying to say one way or the other, but the key is accuracy,’ says Professor Heneghan added.
However Dr Sue Crossland, an acute medicine doctor in an NHS hospital in the North of England, said that from what she saw, a lot of people did die from the virus.
She added: ‘In the first wave, patients severely ill with Covid had very distinct combinations of symptoms like blood clots and lung inflammation. It was unlike anything that any of us had ever seen before.’
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