COVID-19: Death Data in England – Update 9th May

May 9, 2020

Jason Oke, Carl Heneghan


NHS England releases data at 2 pm each day and reports daily count up to the previous day as well as a total figure. We wrote about the problems with reconciling the different data here:

Today’s reported figure is 207 deaths in hospitals in England: 71% fewer than the 711 deaths reported on the same day two weeks ago (Saturday 25th of  April). These deaths are distributed back to the 12th of March: 183 (88%) of the deaths were in the last week, and 24 (12%) occurred more than 7 days ago.

For comparison: the reported deaths in hospitals in England on the same weekday 1, 2 and 3 weeks ago were:

Consistent with previous analyses, the peak day of deaths was the 8th of April. The deaths are  distributed across the following days:

By  setting:

 By region:

By age:

The reporting of deaths by  NHS England underestimate those reported by the Office for National Statistics  – One reason for this is NHS England’s data does not include deaths reported outside hospitals.

Daily reports generally add more to the previous two days  (up to a maximum 300 deaths), and can add back to the previous week’s counts (the grey shaded area in figure  2).

See  also:

COVID-19 Death Data in England – Update 17th April

and

Tracking mortality over time

Assessment of Mortality in the Covid-19 outbreak


AUTHORS

Jason Oke is a Senior Statistician at the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences and Module Coordinator for Statistical Computing with R and Stata (EBHC Med Stats), and Introduction to Statistics for Health Care Research (EBHC), as part of the Evidence-Based Health Care Programme.

Carl Heneghan is Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine, Director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine and Director of Studies for the Evidence-Based Health Care Programme. (Full bio and disclosure statement here)