Image: Peter Macdonald [CC BY-NC 2.0], via Flickr
David Spiegelhalter says mortality data between some countries can be made, contradicting ministers
An academic has slammed the prime minister for misusing an article he wrote warning against comparing coronavirus mortality data between countries.
David Spiegelhalter, professor of the public understanding of risk at the University of Cambridge, was speaking during a House of Commons Science and Technology committee hearing one day after the UK hit what look like the highest Covid-19 death rates in Europe.
In Spiegelhalter’s article, published in the Guardian on 30 April, he highlighted the differences in data collection between countries.
“Every country has different ways of recording Covid-19 deaths,” he wrote. “The numbers may be useful for looking at trends, but they are not reliable indicators for comparing the absolute levels.”
His article was later cited by Boris Johnson in a parliamentary debate on coronavirus in which Johnson warned against international comparisons when faced with questions over the UK’s high death rates.
Spiegelhalter subsequently took to Twitter to issue a “polite request” to the prime minister to “stop using my Guardian article to claim we cannot make any international comparisons”. He added that “of course we should now use other countries to try and learn why our numbers are high”.
Explaining his comments at the Science and Technology Committee hearing, he said he wrote the article in response to “largely media obsession with league tables”.
“Unfortunately, I didn’t make clear that I certainly wasn’t meaning that we couldn’t make any comparisons with what we might call the bottom tier: Portugal, Germany, Austria Norway, Denmark, which have got very low death rates comparatively and they clearly are a different group of countries,” he said.
“Of course, we should be looking at those really gross differences in the way the epidemic has developed but I didn’t make that clear…I was slightly surprised to find my paper being used by politicians to say: ‘Oh, we can’t make any international comparisons yet’.”
He added that open data on testing is “very late” and that other countries have a much better idea of the epidemic there because they have been doing much more testing.
He said: “It really is extraordinary that we’re at this stage of epidemic and yet still don’t know how many people in the country have had [Covid-19]… the fact that we don’t know these basic facts makes it extremely difficult to make judgements about the infection and mortality rate, or anything in fact.”