April 22, 2020

expert reaction to analysis in the Financial Times suggesting COVID-19 may have already caused 41,000 deaths in the UK

The Financial Times have published some in-house analysis* suggesting that COVID-19 may have already caused 41,000 deaths in the UK.

Dr Penny Ward, Visiting Professor in pharmaceutical medicine at Kings College London and the Chair of the Education and Standards Committee of the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Medicine, said:

“The analysis reported in the FT is an extrapolation of the reported total number of deaths from all causes which are collected and reported weekly based on registrations of deaths across the country. The latest report released by the office of national statistics (ONS) reports all death registrations across England and Wales to April 10th. The numbers include deaths in hospital and deaths in the community (i.e. in care homes or hospices or occurring at home) as reported weekly.

“It is usual for a respiratory virus epidemic to be associated with a surge in all-cause mortality – this pattern most usually occurs in the winter months when a variety of epidemics of influenza, RSV and other viral diseases occur, but it can also occur when an epidemic occurs ‘out of season’ – for example during 2009 when the swine flu pandemic occurred in June – August. It is known that COVID-19 is a severe disease and initial epidemic modelling had suggested a potential for a very very high number of deaths – up to 510,000 – to occur during the outbreak in the absence of any attempt to control spread. The evidence of all assessments reported since instituting control measures tends to suggest that the spread of infection may be slowing and thus all-cause mortality may yet slow down as these measures reduce the spread of infection further.”

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

“It is good to see the FT analyses, not least in part because it uses the date of death, rather than merely the misleading numbers related to ‘date of reporting’.

“The presentation of the collected data is good and helpful in allowing comparisons between deaths in hospitals and the different non-hospital settings. There is also acknowledgement of the time lags involved. That in itself is very important – the thirst for real-time information has driven poor reporting of what should be high-quality data. If there is a time lag in collating important information, then so be it, that’s fine. The use of ‘day of reporting’, when referring to COVID-19 deaths, paints a highly misleading picture.”

* https://www.ft.com/content/67e6a4ee-3d05-43bc-ba03-e239799fa6ab

Some background explanation from the analysis author here: https://twitter.com/ChrisGiles_/status/1252841436317315072

All our previous output on this subject can be seen at this weblink: www.sciencemediacentre.org/tag/covid-19

Declared interests

Dr Ward: “I am semi-retired, but I am owner/Director of PWG Consulting (Biopharma) Ltd a consulting firm advising companies on drug and device development. Until July 2019 I was Chief Medical Officer of Virion Biotherapeutics , which was a company developing broad spectrum RNA therapy for the treatment/prevention of respiratory virus infections.”

No others received.