HOW WE COMPILED OUR EVIDENCE

IN AN attempt to compare Covid figures with other major diseases, we were hampered by the fact that the NHS does not keep up-todate and complete data sets for non-Covid diseases.

The type of data available varied between deaths, hospitalisations and diagnoses. Ideally, we would analyse the most recent monthly figures for a full month – July 2021 – for Covid, and compare this against the equivalent for the other five diseases.

For deaths, this data was available, so we plotted the monthly Covid death figure for July against the total monthly deaths for each other condition. But for non-Covid hospitalisations and diagnoses, monthly data was not available before 2020. In these cases, we computed our own monthly averages based on broader data from 2015 to 2020.