April 21, 2020

digest of the ONS stats on COVID-19 deaths

With ONS stats on numbers of deaths involving COVID-19 in England and Wales being published weekly, we brought three statisticians and experts into a Zoom briefing to give journalists their digest of the numbers and what they mean, and to answer questions about these stats and wider questions on how deaths and cases are counted and how trends are analysed.

Speakers included:

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

Prof Carl Heneghan, Director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, and Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine, University of Oxford

Dr Jason Oke, Senior Statistician at the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford