Corona virus : what the death toll is not telling us 

the daily death toll that we see at the moment is not accurate that it does not capture all of the deaths that are taking place in the UK at the moment after lockdown began still the growth rate was that deaths were doubling every three days the figures only relate to deaths that have taken place in hospitals in NHS settings so this means that all the deaths that are taking place in care homes in the community and when I say in the community I mean people dying in their homes we don't know about these figures are only collected by Counting mortality statistics which is death certificates it might be the case that as many as 50% of the deaths that were taking place we're actually happening in care homes and in the community.

the time we just did not know about them figures as they stand don't tell us an awful lot about who has dying they don't tend to give us a lot of detail about age about sex a particularly about ethnicity and when it comes to ethnicity this is key because we already know from statistics that be AME people are over-represented in critical care units so this means that they are showing up in disproportionate numbers but we don't know who is dying in terms of ethnicity and this is because in the UK they do not record ethnicity on death certificates the daily death toll that we see at the moment is not accurate .

           the figure that we get relates to deaths that have not just taken place in the past 24 hours but deaths that have taken place in previous weeks 759 8911 thousand 329 people have now died from coronavirus so this means that the figure that we hear about every day is lagging the reason the death toll is so important is because we don't have extensive testing so deaths aren't the only figure that we will have at the end of this which gives us a real sense of how many people died from the virus there have been promises at various stages that there would be a hundred thousand tests per day carried out but at the moment the daily total is No we're near that there could be many reasons.

  that people are dying in the community that we don't know about and this could be because they're not coming forward for treatment because they're scared to go to hospital or they believe that health services might be under excessive pressure a much more transparent way of reporting the figures would be to be clear about the deaths that are taking place at hospital versus the deaths that are taking place in the community and to have a more up-to-date a kind of those figures in daily press conferences other things that could be included that would make the death toll a lot more clear would be details about who this is actually impacting if we had more details about the agents about sex and about the ethnicity of the people who are dying from the virus we'd be able to understand it and perhaps formulate more effective public policy in order to tackle it you