Carl Hennigan

There's hardly anything happening here.

So that's really important.

You can look at respiratory deaths.

And they include viral pneumonia, which people have considered to be one of the end stage effects in SARS.

But actually, they've not gone up by much.

They've only gone up by about 500 in the week.

You'd expect a much higher trend upwards in them deaths.

The second issue is we've seen that the data suggests there's under-reporting of COVID, particularly in the very elderly, over 85s.

but not under-reporting in younger age groups, under 75, right down to 45-year-olds.

It looks like there's some real effect there, that there's something else going on.

Now, importantly, the head of the ONS said, because of the importance of this issue, next week they're going to try and drill down more on the ICD code data,

They only produce the respiratory conditions now, but they're going to start to put out more like the cardiovascular issues next week so we can understand what's going on.

So that comes out on Tuesday of each week.

There may be a bit of a blip again, though, because we've had Easter weekend, the Friday and the Monday, and there may have been a bit of a blip in terms of registering deaths in that period.

So we may see some

and Carl.

Hi, I'm Carl Hennigan.

I'm Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford and Editor-in-Chief of BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine.

Yeah, no, it's really interesting.

I think what we've seen now is a lot more organisations coming to the table, if you like.