May 4, 2020

expert comments about UK’s number of COVID19-related deaths approaching Italy’s number of COVID19-related deaths

There have been questions from journalist regarding the number of deaths from COVID-19 in the UK nearing that of Italy. 

Prof Sir David Spiegelhalter, Chair, Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication, University of Cambridge, said:

“The one thing we can be certain of is that all these numbers are substantial underestimates of the true number who have died from COVID, and an even bigger underestimate of the number who have died because of the epidemic and the measures taken against it.  I think we can safely say that none of these countries are doing well, but this is not Eurovision and it is pointless to try and rank them.  For example, apparently around half of Belgium’s deaths are people in care homes who have not been tested, and these would not feature at all in the daily UK figures.  I believe the only sensible comparison is by looking at excess all-cause mortality, adjusted for the age distribution of the country.  And even then it will be very difficult to ascribe the reasons for any differences.”

Dr Michael Head, Senior Research Fellow in Global Health, University of Southampton, said:

“It is important to remember that cross-country comparisons are difficult.  Approaches to recording deaths can vary greatly from country to country, such as the data entered onto a death certificate.  The UK records direct and indirect causes of death plus also other contributing factors.  There may be variation in how doctors record the impact of COVID-19 in any individual death onto those certificates, and this practice can vary from country to country (for example are suspected COVID-19 cases included in the death statistics or is it purely confirmed cases?).”

All our previous output on this subject can be seen at this weblink:

www.sciencemediacentre.org/tag/covid-19

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