Daily death toll is being inflated, say scientists

FEWER than 40 people are dying from coronavirus each day in England, a smaller number than Government figures suggest, experts have claimed.

Leading statisticians at Oxford University have warned that official data published daily by the Government has been inflating the true scale of virus deaths “for some time”.

In the early days of

Street press briefings, officials cautioned the public not to take the precise daily figures literally because of delays in reporting deaths.

They then introduced a seven-day rolling average, which they said gave a more accurate representation.

However, the Oxford scientists said that while, initially, this device understated daily deaths it has, more recently, overstated the real death toll.

They said that an analysis of the more nuanced figures from the Office for National Statistics shows a growing disparity with the mortality reported by Public Health England (PHE). The academics cite the PHE moving average for June 30 as 103, which is more than the ONS figures for June 30 and July 1 combined.

Writing on the blog for the Centre for Evidence-based Medicine, Profs Carl Heneghan and Jason Oke, said: “The PHE figures also vary substantially from day to day. This variation is most likely due to the appearance of ‘historic’ deaths that have occurred weeks before but, for some reason, get reported in batches on particular days.”

On Tuesday, the ONS published deaths registered in England and Wales in the week to July 3, revealing that 532 – 6 per cent of the 9,140 total – mentioned Covid-19 on death certificates.

The figure indicates the slide from a peak of 1,272 deaths on April 8.

The Oxford analysis shows that one of the deaths included in the total for yesterday took place on April 27, another three in May and two in June.

Last night, the Department of Health and Social Care said that a total of 45,053 people had died of Covid-19 in hospitals, care homes and the wider community as of 5pm on Tuesday.