Official data for deaths from covid in England and Wales

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Amity Island

Amity Island

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Freedom of information request confirms total so far of 17,371 deaths attributed to covid only. Average age of death for covid 82.5 years of age, higher than the typical age of death.
 
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There should really be a distinction between a medically qualified "Doctor", and a "Doctor of Philosophy"
 
Have a listen to this weeks More or Less on radio 4. A neutral on there explained the reasons why different people come up with different interpretations of the available data. Essentially, if I remember correctly, the "dashboard" data, collected quickly and published daily and based solely on whether there was a positive covid test within 28 days, is more fuzzy than the "death certificate" data which takes days to compile but gives a considered opinion on the factors causing the death of the patient.

He made a point at the end which summed things up very well I think. If you only look at the "death certificate" data what you find is that with previous variants a bit over 10% of deaths were not influenced by the fact that the patient had a covid infection. With the omicron variant, this rises to just over 20%. Either way up, the majority of deaths in the covid death statistics do in fact record a death of somebody from a covid infection and not just somebody with a covid infection.

Covid kills people.
 
I tend only to use my title (I have a PhD degree) if somebody wants to play qualification top trumps when trying to demonstrate how clever they are. Over the last 10 years the consultant neurologist I have been seeing has gone from Mr, to Dr when he was awarded a PhD and is now styled Professor after some appointment within some medical school somewhere. Needless to say I sign off anything I send to his department with my full insignia! Otherwise it is usually more important for people to know I am a male.
 
Amity Island said:
Covid19 coronavirus was originally called novel coronavirus-infected pneumonia (NCIP). The World Health Organization renamed it COVID-19. Given the vaccines don't prevent pneumonia, I would of expected to see pneumonia listed as the cause of death or ADSR accute respitory distress syndrome.
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Quite likely, but that still doesn't provide quite what he wants. If someone's described as dying from cardiac arrest (caused by COVID-19) that doesn't mean they had some previous heart condition.

I think what the Guardian's article is probably using is better, where (I'm imagining, anyway) ONS is looking at deaths and at health records for comorbidities. (If it's not, then that could surely be done. And was done by that paper early on looking at relative risks for people who ended up in ICU.)

As @Docb notes in terms of the number of deaths there are several measures. I think they also produce numbers of deaths within 60 days of a positive test, though I can't see where that's published. (Maybe it was dropped at some point.)

There's also a definitional issue: there's studies indicating people who are hospitalised and then leave have a much higher chance of death in the next year than those who aren't hospitalised. I'm guessing many of those deaths won't mention COVID-19 but there's an argument that perhaps they should be included somehow.

(My guess is what's on the death certificates probably give the best indication, and on that measure we passed 150k a while ago.)
 
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