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, if he will take steps to reduce the use of aggregate data as severity markers during potential future pandemics as a result of the heterogeneity of definitions of cases and attribution of deaths.

The UK Health Security Agency publishes data on deaths in England on the GOV.UK COVID-19 Dashboard by age, sex, date of death and local authority to understand population level trends in the pandemic while reducing the risk of deductive disclosure of individual patient information. Aggregate data on hospitalisations is based on data reported to NHS England and NHS Improvement.