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The UK has now overtaken Italy to have the highest number of officially recorded coronavirus deaths in Europe.
The figures – announced by both governments daily – show a total of 29,427 deaths in the UK and 29,315 in Italy.
But can you make a fair comparison between the two countries?
There are challenges around doing this at the moment and here are some of the factors to take into account.
1. Population sizes
For a start, the UK’s population is roughly 66 million, and Italy’s is about 60 million.
So the UK would have to register at least 10% more deaths than Italy for it to have a higher death rate per person.
Given that Italy is further past the peak of the outbreak, and is now recording significantly fewer deaths per day than the UK, that may well happen.
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2. The two countries may not be counting the same way
The different ways different countries count deaths also need to be considered.
“Every country measures deaths in a different way,” the UK government’s chief medical adviser Chris Whitty said at one daily briefing, “so comparing them to each other is a largely fruitless exercise”.
On the face of it, Italy and the UK now do it in fairly similar ways – only including confirmed Covid-19 cases in their cumulative daily counts.
But while it is safe to assume the figures for the numbers of deaths in hospitals are fairly accurate, can the same be said about deaths in care homes or at home?
There is no national figure in Italy for deaths in care homes – the numbers are collated on a regional basis and slightly different measures are being used in different parts of the country.
But, says Eleonora Perobelli, a researcher at the Observatory on Long Term Care in Milan, “the vast majority of officially confirmed Covid-19 related deaths are registered in hospitals”.
We do know that the UK figures as of 5 May include more than 4,600 people who died “in a community setting’”- in other words outside hospital. We also know that there were relatively few tests carried out in care homes until recently.
But in Italy, we simply don’t know how many of the Italian deaths may have occurred outside hospital.
So it is difficult in this case to be confident that we really are comparing like with like.
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3. Testing
Given that the daily figures released by both governments are for people who have died after testing positive for coronavirus, how much testing is going on is clearly important.
To use an extreme example, if neither country had tested any people at all, nobody would have died after testing positive. On the other hand, if everybody in the country had been tested the deaths figure would have been much higher.
The UK is currently testing more people per day than Italy, but overall Italy, which has been in lockdown longer, has carried out more than 2.2 million tests as of 5 May while the UK has done over 1.3 million.
For daily figures that are based on people who have tested positive for the virus, that is a crucial dis