his is the latest (still ongoing):

> Good morning Dr Schestowitz
>
> Apologies, I didn’t note the screenshot in your first email.
>
> For the week you are referencing, we did not publish the numbers of
> death occurrences (date of death) for that week and these were updated
> the following week.
>
> There would have been no changes in any of the tables that use
> registrations data, but you would see the undercount in the occurrences.
>
> May I ask what table you are looking at?
>
> Kind regards
>
> Anne

Hi,

Thanks for the quick reply.

On December 20th the page looked like this:

That was minutes after the 10AM (ish) update.

Despite what it said in the text, the spreadsheet file was updated that morning and included Week 49. Here is a screenshot:

This screenshot was taken on December 20th.

I was expecting that on January 5th this number should be amended, as the figure for Week 49 was incomplete. But in all subsequent updates that number remained the same, so either the missing deaths were added cumulatively to Weeks 50 (onwards) or something went wrong. No “(i) Notice” has been shown since then, so I’m left wondering what actually happened. I need to be sure this data is accurate.

I expressed these concerns publicly about half a dozen times before I learned that Professor Fenon et al had made a formal complaint to the Statistic Regulator. Their complaints is completely unrelated. But it increased my doubts and scepticism about ONS-provided data.

I’ve used your data for a long time. I need to understand why the Week 49 figure (shown in the screenshot above) remained unchanged.
You said: “For the week you are referencing, we did not publish the numbers of death occurrences (date of death) for that week and these were updated the following week.”

If you mean you did not publish Week 49 figures on December 20th, then that is patently untrue and I took a screenshot to prove it. The spreadsheet file was updated that day. It contained the figure for Week 49.

I have more screenshots from around that time and I can provide them to you.

Are we talking about sheet #2 rather than #11?

Regards,

For some background see this prior episode.

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