For England and Wales, authoritative figures on Covid-mention deaths (bar those referred to coroners and not yet registered) are reported weekly by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Tuesday’s report accounted for 50,548 Covid-mention deaths registered by 3 July 2020 with ONS for England and Wales.
By comparison, the daily cumulative count of confirmed Covid deaths is something of an undercount. I think it important that in reporting on Covid-19 deaths, journalists set the daily count against the larger backdrop of the latest ONS count along with the cumulative count of excess deaths from early March (also from ONS). Few news reports report all three – perhaps because the ONS’s counts are released only weekly. However, they give a more complete picture on a weekly basis than does the daily reporting of a subset of Covid-mention deaths. The daily tallies are themselves subject to reporting delay.
Public Health England may, in effect, be following up a national virtual cohort, namely: England’s cohort of persons who ever tested positive for Sars-CoV-2. Follow-up for all-cause and cause-specific mortality in distinct epochs of time after swab-date is prudent. Indeed, this type of record-linkage study for the short- and longer-term fatal effects of Covid-19 disease has considerable merit in its own right.
The problem comes if PHE does not make clear whether the deaths they report are Covid-mention on death certification; and in which epoch of follow-up (first 4-weeks, next 8-weeks, weeks 12-26 after swab-date) the death occurred.
