Why stop publishing stats?
The government has “paused” publishing daily coronavirus statistics for England because of concerns about their accuracy.
The reason for this is because one component of the data – which shows deaths from England – is suspected and thought to be “over-exaggerating” the count.
Academics at the University of East Anglia and the University of Oxford raised the alarm last week and said a methodological problem in the way Public Health England (PHE) gathers the data could be giving false positives.
Effectively, they say 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”. But it doesn’t take into account whether they
have been discharged, or are elderly and might die from other causes.
Scotland and Northern Ireland’s equivalent data uses a 28-day cut-off to get around this problem. But as a result of the question marks over England, the entire dataset has been suspended.
The important thing to remember is these aren’t the only statistics: you will still have seen the NHS England death toll released on Saturday as usual. This has a different methodology, and counts confirmed individual deaths in hospitals.
The overall Office for National Statistics figures, showing “excess deaths” that are released more infrequently and cover England and Wales, will also still continue.
There isn’t thought to be a problem with these approaches, so it is unlikely the overall picture is very different to the one we’ve been seeing when you take into account all data sources.