A STATISTICIAN has told Boris Johnson to stop citing his article when arguing the UK’s death toll should not be judged against other countries’.
The Prime Minister has sought to deflect from the news that the UK has Europe’s worst mortality figures by insisting that it is too early to make international comparisons.
This week it was announced that more than 32,000 people in the UK have died from Covid-19 – surpassing Italy’s total.
Writing in the Guardian, statistician professor David Spiegelhalter pointed out that international comparisons were tricky because of differing methods used to collect data. However, he warned the UK’s death toll was likely to be an underestimation because it did not include many deaths of people who had not been tested for the virus.
On the day the piece was published, England’s chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty said it demonstrated that comparing death rates was a “fruitless exercise”.
READ MORE: Statistician says England's real coronavirus death toll is 44,000
Pressed on the fatality figures by Keir Starmer during PMQs yesterday, Johnson said the Labour leader “is right to draw attention to the appalling statistics not just in this country and but of course around the world. I would echo what we’ve heard from Prof David Spiegelhalter and others that at this stage, I don’t think that international comparisons and the data is yet there to draw all the conclusions that we want.”
He added: “There will be a time to look at what decisions we took and whether we could have taken different decisions.”
However, a few hours later Spiegelhalter tweeted: “Polite request to PM and others: please stop using my Guardian article to claim we cannot make any international comparisons yet. I refer only to detailed league tables-of course we should now use other countries to try and learn why our numbers are high.”
Polite request to PM and others: please stop using my Guardian article to claim we cannot make any international comparisons yet. I refer only to detailed league tables-of course we should now use other countries to try and learn why our numbers are high https://t.co/VQCwoYROK2
— David Spiegelhalter (@d_spiegel) May 6, 2020
Meanwhile, statistician Nigel Marriott has said that more than 44,000 people have now died in England from Covid-19 or because of the lockdown.
He announced data suggests that, on top of almost 33,000 deaths where Covid-19 has been registered on the death certificate, there were a further 11,000 deaths directly or indirectly linked to Covid-19 as of May 1.
Marriott estimates that 44,000 people have now died as a result of Covid-19 or as a result of the lockdown across England.
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