FACT CHECK Covid-19 hospitalisations are currently lower than they were this time last year
The chief executive of NHS England made the startling claim that fourteen times more people were in hospital with Covid-19 than we saw this time last year.
Thankfully though, this isn’t anywhere near correct.
The data Ms Pritchard was referring to compares the number of people admitted to hospital with Covid-19 in August 2021 with August 2020, not the total number of people in hospital with Covid now as she said.
A year ago, there were 10,994 people in English hospitals with Covid-19, and the latest data available when Ms Pritchard was speaking, showed that figure was now 7,072—that’s 36% less, not 14 times more.
As for new admissions, this is also below the level it was this time last year.
Eighteen months into the pandemic, and still some newspapers are failing to acknowledge the weekend lag in the reporting of Covid deaths.
On Tuesday, The Standard, The Sun and The Guardian all gave a misleading impression of the latest death figures.
While they were technically accurate (262 deaths were reported that day), this did not represent a rise in the general trend. The average daily number of reported Covid deaths actually fell slightly on 9 November, to about 166.
This is because the reporting process is generally slower at the weekend. As a result, the number of Covid deaths announced on Sundays and Mondays is typically low. The reporting catches up on Tuesdays, when many of the missing weekend deaths are added to the day’s total, making it higher.
This causes the number of Covid deaths by reporting date to rise and fall in a weekly cycle. It certainly doesn’t mean that there are dramatic changes in the number of people dying each day.
The Coronavirus Dashboard recommends looking at a weekly average. Its average at the time of writing is flat, or slightly falling.
A recent Independent article stated that a new poll had found a “majority” of respondents were in favour of a new lockdown to curb Covid cases. But this wasn’t true.
Fewer than 40%—a clear minority—said they wanted new restrictions to be implemented.Not only that, the poll consisted of a survey of “nearly 700” of the Independent’s own readers, and was run by the publication itself.
As we have written recently, a poll is only useful if you have some confidence that the people you are surveying are broadly representative of the people you’re interested in. There is no indication in the article that the Independent took any steps to ensure they had included a representative sample of readers in their survey. We’ve asked the Independent for more details on how it carried out the poll.
After being initially contacted by us about the inaccuracy, the Independent corrected their article. But the headline may still be misleading as it does not address the issue of how representative the sample was.
