The UK health secretary, Matt Hancock, is ordering an urgent review of the daily Covid-19 death statistics produced by Public Health England, after it emerged they may include recovered former sufferers who could have died of other causes. The oddity was revealed in a paper by Yoon K Loke and Carl Heneghan of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford University, called “Why no one can ever recover from Covid-19 in England – a statistical anomaly”. Their analysis suggests PHE cross-checks the latest notifications of deaths against a database of positive test results – so that anyone who has ever tested positive is recorded in the Covid-19 death statistics. “It seems that PHE regularly looks for people on the NHS database who have ever tested positive, and simply checks to see if they are still alive or not. PHE does not appear to consider how long ago the Covid test result was, nor whether the person has been successfully treated in hospital and discharged to the community,” the authors said. They said this was the reason why PHE figures “vary substantially from day to day”. They also said about 80,000 recovered patients in the community were continuing to be monitored by PHE for the daily death statistics, even though many are elderly and may die of something else. They concluded: “It’s time to fix this statistical flaw that leads to an over-exaggeration of Covid-associated deaths.” A Department of Health and Social Care source said: “You could have been tested positive in February, have no symptoms, then hit by a bus in July and you’d be recorded as a Covid death.” Dr Susan Hopkins, Public Health England’s incident director, said: “Although it may seem straightforward, there is no WHO agreed method of counting deaths from COVID-19. In England, we count all those that have died who had a positive COVID-19 test at any point, to ensure our data is as complete as possible. “We must remember that this is a new and emerging infection and there is increasing evidence of long term health problems for some of those affected. Whilst this knowledge is growing, now is the right time to review how deaths are calculated.” The same approach is not used in Scotland, where Nicola Sturgeon recently hailed a full week without any deaths from the virus. In Scotland, there is a 28-day cut-off, after a patient who has tested positive is not automatically considered to have died from the virus. Northern Ireland also uses the 28-day cut-off model. Experts had already cautioned against relying too heavily on the daily death statistics – preferring instead to focus on the Office for National Statistics’ measure of excess deaths, which has passed 65,000.