It's a difficult one - the small print says "Deaths FOR ANY REASON within 28 days of a positive test".
However, in the spring, we only had testing capacity for patients admitted to hospital due to covid. Therefore a very high % of "covid deaths" were exclusively from covid.
Ultimately, all covid data is built on the PCR tests. Alarmingly, our government doesn't know the false positive rate of these tests which it is using up and down the country, however it is estimated to be around 1% as Matt Hancock grudgingly admitted in a radio interview. This sounds small but when you're carrying out 300,000 tests each day, this accounts for around 3000 false positive test results. As tests carried out increase, the FPR can only increase due to the pressure that the labs are put under.
During the summer we rolled out community testing for whoever wants/needs a test, aka pillar 2 testing. The vast majority of hospital and care home patients are also regularly tested for covid, regardless of their condition. The issue with this, therefore, is people are unfortunately dying from a variety of illnesses as they always have, but if they've had a positive test result (possible false positive) in the last 28 days then they will be added to the daily "covid deaths" number. Basically, in March/April/May, pretty much all "covid deaths" were actually from covid. Since the summer, with mass testing, it has been very difficult to tell who has died from covid and who has died with covid just by looking at the data.
This makes it very hard for us to get a grasp of the impact covid is currently having on all-cause mortality in the UK. There was obviously a very large spike in March and April when the pandemic took hold but up until a few weeks ago our all-cause mortality had been on a par with the 5 yearly average. In the last few weeks, we have seen a small excess emerge away from the baseline, this is likely driven by covid deaths in the North West, North East and Midlands. These areas weren't hit as hard at the start of the pandemic in Spring. London was hit really hard in the Spring, and this is why their covid deaths are so low now - they have reached a level of community immunity which prevents a large-scale outbreak occuring.
