eltonioni wrote:For example @kanga, taking the highest level imaginable, have you forgotten how deaths from all causes were legally recorded as a Covid death if the deceased had tested positive previously?
What I recall (happy, of course, to be corrected) is that PHE (and the other UK nations' equivalents ?), as soon as tests were available, reported deaths explicitly
with the detail 'within 28 days of a positive test'; and this was explicitly repeated in at least BBC news site reports of the figures. I do not recall Ministers failing to include that gloss. Other media may have, and ISTR from images of newspapers' front pages some of their headlines did leave it out.
This approach had the
advantage of providing a constant metric, enabling trends to be observed; it had the
disadvantage, obviously, that not all such deaths were anything to do with Covid (potentially leading to overreporting), while not all deaths which ought to have been attributed to Covid or complications thereof had pertinent testing done or reported (potentially leading to underreporting). Obviously, other statistics could have been used, and may in some sense have been 'better' (eg, explicit mention of Covid on Death Certificates). However, they, too, may not have been as useful as a trend illustration; eg, because clinicians were learning all the time, but equally were under great time pressures at peaks.
I do not see how this approach could be fairly described as '
authorities trying to
misrepresent'.
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