Day: 13 August 2020

The Re-Adjustment Bureau Hats off to Carl Heneghan and Yoon Loke. Three weeks ago, they wrote a post on the Centre For Evidence-Based Medicine blog drawing attention to a peculiarity in the way Public Health England (PHE) recorded Covid deaths. They discovered that if you'd ever tested positive for COVID-19 and you subsequently died, even if several months had elapsed since the test, your death was recorded as being from coronavirus. PHE does not appear to consider how long ago the Covid test result was, nor whether the person has been successfully treated in hospital and discharged to the community. Anyone who has tested Covid positive but subsequently died at a later date of any cause will be included on the PHE Covid death figures.By this PHE definition, no one with Covid in England is allowed to ever recover from their illness. A patient who has tested positive, but successfully treated and discharged from hospital, will still be counted as a Covid death even if they had a heart attack or were run over by a bus three months later. After their post was published, Matt Hancock announced a review into the way in which PHE collects Covid data and temporarily suspended its publication. Yesterday, that review was concluded and PHE has said that henceforth it will only record a ...