No room for complacency over Covid death toll

Jonathan Van-Tam reproduces the distortion that “deaths are at a very low level in the UK” (Coronavirus: rise in UK cases because people have ‘relaxed too much’, 7 September). But this raises the question, low compared with what?

The basis of the government’s daily Covid-19 death data was changed on 12 August – from all deaths where the deceased had previously tested positive for coronavirus to only deaths within 28 days of a positive test.

This change in recording criteria may or may not be sensible, but it is undoubtedly the case that, at the stroke of a pen, it greatly reduced the numbers recorded as Covid deaths. And this is crucial in considering whether current levels of deaths are low.

So on current figures – using the 28-day cut off – daily death figures for England are in single figures or the teens. But if we take the figure used until early August, then we see much higher figures. This latter data – still published daily by Public Health England – shows, for example, that in the seven days between 30 August and 5 September, there were 344 recorded coronavirus deaths; for the same period, using the government’s new criterion, there were 43 such deaths – a reduction by a factor of eight, ie almost 50 a day compared with six a day. Determining whether the death rate is low is a function of the comparator being used.
Prof Steve Tombs
Department of social policy and criminology, the Open University

• I have to question Dr Ray Sinclair’s assumptions that just because the number of UK deaths isn’t immediately tracking the rise in new cases, this is not going to change in the coming weeks (Letters, 4 September).

I recently saw many comments like this aimed at similar statistics in the US, as cases rose quickly from 20,000 a day to 60,000-plus, but deaths continued for a while in the low hundreds. People seemed to think that was due to similar changes in the age makeup of those testing positive and a less lethal mutation.

As expected, however, deaths rose far later and have been well over 1,000 per day consistently for the last few weeks (and continue at this rate even though there has been some fall in new cases). A simple demonstration of leading and lagging indicators.
Richard Post
Little Kineton, Warwickshire