Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, with reference to the report published by Collateral Global entitled Understanding Definitions and Reporting of Deaths Attributed to COVID-19 in the UK, whether he is taking steps to create a systematic process based on consistent definitions for verifying covid-19 deaths.

The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) provides a daily number of deaths in people with a positive COVID-19 test, to rapidly report numbers of deaths each day and provide surveillance of trends in mortality and underlying transmission. There are two definitions of a death in a person with COVID-19 in England:

- A death in a person with a positive COVID-19 test who died within 28 days of the first positive specimen date of the most recent episode of infection; and

- A death in a person with a positive COVID-19 test who died within 60 days of the first specimen date of the most recent episode of infection.

Verifying the number of people who have died from COVID-19 related illness is complex and this is one of several measures of deaths used by the Government, including death certificates and excess deaths. Multiple data sources are triangulated to provide the most accurate picture of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.