Mirror wrong to say NHS standards ‘since Covid’ behind excess cardiovascular deaths

An article in the print edition of the Daily Mirror misreported research about excess deaths from the British Heart Foundation (BHF).

The article, which was published on 22 June, said: “More people are dying of heart attacks and strokes because NHS care standards have collapsed since the pandemic.

“Almost 100,000 extra cardiovascular disease deaths than expected have been recorded.”

The article went on to cite research from the BHF as its source. But this isn’t what the charity’s research said.

The BHF said that 96,540 more people than expected died with cardiovascular disease mentioned on their death certificates in England, between the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020 and late May 2023.

However, this doesn’t mean that these extra deaths were exclusively caused by poor NHS care standards, as the Mirror article suggests.

Indeed there are reasons to think, as the BHF has said, that Covid itself may have been a significant factor. In other words, some of the people with cardiovascular disease who died in this period might still be alive if they hadn’t caught the virus.

We’ve written before about previous BHF research being misunderstood in a similar way.

The media must report research accurately so that the public understands what we know and what we don’t—especially when it comes to health.

Health misinformation that spreads at scale can introduce confusion about the causes and treatments of illnesses, create distrust in medical professionals, and damage public health.

What the BHF said

As in its research published last year, the BHF looked at the number of excess deaths in England, as reported by the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID).

This time, the BHF looked at excess deaths involving cardiovascular disease—meaning the extra number of death certificates that mentioned it, above what might have been expected in a given period.

Death certificates can mention more than one cause of death, but only one can be the “underlying cause”. So while some of these deaths will have been mainly or only from cardiovascular disease, the figure also includes people who had cardiovascular disease, but who ultimately died “of” something else. The “underlying cause of death” is defined as “the disease or injury that initiated the train of events directly leading to death”.

During the period that the BHF considered—21 March 2020 to 26 May 2023—deaths involving cardiovascular disease included 73,658 people who died with Covid-19 listed as the underlying cause on their death certificate. Most of these deaths were in the first two waves of the pandemic in spring 2020 and winter 2020/21.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that excess cardiovascular deaths would have been 73,658 lower without the pandemic, because some of these people might still have died without Covid—whether from cardiovascular disease or from something else.

But it does suggest that Covid itself may have been a significant factor behind the rise of deaths “involving cardiovascular disease” that the BHF described.

The BHF itself says in its press release for the latest research: “In the first year of the pandemic, Covid-19 infection drove high numbers of excess deaths involving cardiovascular disease”. But this is not reflected in the Mirror’s reporting.

So while it is true that OHID data shows excess cardiovascular deaths continuing in 2022 and 2023, the figure of 100,000 includes a very large number of people who died of Covid in 2020 and 2021.

Full Fact has approached the Daily Mirror for comment.

Image courtesy of Towfiqu barbhuiya