Claims shared on social media, including by the former Brexit secretary David Davis, that the true number of deaths in England and Wales caused by Covid could be 17,000 have been debunked as “spurious” and factually incorrect by the Office for National Statistics.
The ONS responded after tweets by Davis suggesting that the figure 17,371 represented the death toll in people with no other underlying causes. Davis tweeted: “Up to the end of September 2021, the official count of the deaths of people with Covid was 137,133.” He added a freedom of information (FoI) request indicated only 17,371 of those deaths occurred in people with no underlying causes.
