Officials in the UK have been were over-reporting hospital admissions for Covid19 at the peak of the pandemic, it has been revealed.
An investigation for the Government’s Science Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) found that individuals were being counted as Covid19 hospital admissions if they had tested positive for the virus once – even if the virus was not the reason they were being admitted to hospital.
The revelations call the integrity of the UK’s hospital admissions data into question. At the peak of the pandemic in early April, nearly 20,000 a week were reported being admitted to hospital due to Covid19.
Professor Graham Medley, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, asked by Sage to look into the matter, told The Telegraph: “By June, it was becoming clear that people were being admitted to hospital for non-Covid reasons who had tested positive many weeks before…”
The revelations come on the heels of other revelations that the UK government’s Covid19 data was inaccurate. In July, UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock was forced to admit major errors in the recording of coronavirus fatalities where deaths from other causes were being listed as Covid19 deaths, resulting in mortalities effectively being “double counted.”