Thousands of probable cases of Covid caught in hospitals in NHS England have been excluded from official figures.
Health officials calculating the rate of cases in hospital settings omitted instances where patients contracted coronavirus between seven and 14 days after admission - despite the fact the virus has an incubation period of up to six days in 95 per cent of cases.
This practice goes directly against official advice to staff to categorised these cases as hospital onset infections, and allowed NHS England to claim that its nosocomial rates - referring to Covid patients infected in hospital - are down to as little as 7.7 per cent.
Sarah Knapton, Science Editor of the
Telegraph, has produced an in-depth analysis of the statistics around the second wave . It shows that
misunderstood and misrepresented data are leading people to exaggerate the scale of the winter resurgence compared to the first peak last year.
On January 13th, Dr Yvonne Doyle, the Medical Director at Public Health England (PHE), issued an alarming statement claiming that Britain had reported the highest number of coronavirus deaths on a single day since the pandemic began.
She also alleged that there have now been more deaths in the second wave than the first.
Both these statements were technically true. On that day, 1,564 people were added to official mortality figures, the highest number ever, while the 44,198 second wave coronavirus deaths passed the 40,563 recorded up to August 31st.
Industry News
By Jess Browne-Swinburne
19 Jan 2021
Professor Juan Franco, a family doctor and researcher, has been appointed as the new Editor-in-Chief of BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine, one of more than 70 specialist journals published by BMJ.
Professor Franco succeeds Carl Heneghan, Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) and Director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (CEBM) at Oxford University’s Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, who has been Editor-in-Chief since June 2017.
Professor Franco is a family doctor at the Hospital Italiano de Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Vice-Chair of the Research Department at the Instituto Universitario Hospital Italiano (IUHI), where he is also Director of the Cochrane Associate Centre.
She also alleged that there have now been more deaths in the second wave than the first.
Both these statements were technically true. On that day, 1,564 people were added to official mortality figures, the highest number ever, while the 44,198 second wave coronavirus deaths passed the 40,563 recorded up to August 31.
Yet dig a little deeper and the narrative that the second wave is more deadly than the first begins to unravel.
I make an early caveat here that I firmly believe we are having a deadly second wave, and thousands more people are dying than would be expected ordinarily at this time of year. But it is not the tens of thousands more PHE would have you believe.
JAMA Network Open. Researchers proved their point by analyzing studies of imaging of children with COVID-19.
The role of peer-reviewed literature during the COVID-19 pandemic has become a hotly debated topic. While some observers have welcomed the rapid dissemination of information, others have questioned the quality of studies that are being published.
In the current research letter, researchers acknowledged the important role of academic research in informing clinical decisions when treating children with COVID-19. But the explosion of medical research in the past year including some systematic reviews has seen the publication of many reviews that answer the same question using the same few primary studies.