As is often said, choose your statistics carefully and you can use them make just about any point you want to. But rarely does the Office for National Statistics put out two releases on the same day whose statistics point in totally opposite directions. If you listened to the BBC midday news, you may have heard that overall deaths in England and Wales, while they have fallen, are still running at 5.9 per cent above the average for the time of year. This was based on an ONS release entitled Deaths Registered Weekly in England and Wales.
However, poke your nose in another release put out an hour or so earlier, entitled Deaths Involving Covid-19, and you would have come to exactly the opposite conclusion: that overall deaths in England and Wales are running at 5.9 per cent below the average of the past five years (8,686 compared with 9,233).
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