Carl Hennigan

So one of the things that I considered within SARS was that you were preparing for a viral pneumonia problem that required all the ventilators because you get this sudden acute respiratory problem that requires ventilation and oxygen.

But the interesting issue is, if you look at all respiratory disease deaths, and they're coded ICD codes between J0099, you don't need to know that.

But in week 15, there were only 1,810 deaths with that code on their death certificate.

And that's actually a decrease of 14% compared with the previous week.

So that suggests that the majority of deaths that have been occurring are not predominantly respiratory and are caused by other conditions, because particularly on a death certificate, if it was pneumonia, you would have that on there.

In a flu outbreak, when you get excess deaths, about one third of all deaths have pneumonia on their certificate.

Well, I think the proportion of people who have recorded went up from last week to 80%.

So I think it's clearer that the coding is getting better.

And actually, what you might see is a tendency to over-attribute now because COVID is everywhere.

So the potential in hospitals is if you think a patient's had it, you're likely to put it on the death certificate.

What will happen in the lighter days when we come back is we can't tell this now.

We'll be particularly looking at those that died from it versus those that died with it.

And over the next six months, we'll be looking at the ONS data to look at what the overall pattern looks like.

We have come in into the winter with a very mild seasonal effect.

So if you look at the overall data, it suggests we've got about 10,000 excess deaths for this point in the year, which is less than the COVID because there are less deaths from the seasonal effect of influenza.

There's another thing also that happened this week that we think is a really positive move.

NHS England have now started reporting their data by the date of death.

as opposed to the day that they get to find out about it.

And that's incredibly important is when we get these daily announcements that says there's 680 deaths today, that doesn't actually mean that.

What it means is we're being made aware of 688 deaths and they then get back a portion to which date they actually occurred.