Is Scotland over-counting Covid patients in hospital?
From our UK edition
Recently, the government has provided Covid data on a UK basis – merging official figures from the constituent parts of the UK. But are the English and Scottish figures really comparable? Take figures for the number of Covid patients in hospital in Scotland on 28 August. The Scottish official count is 255, a drop of 42 per cent since 1 July. But this is odd when you see that England has recorded a far higher drop, of 81 per cent (from 2,289 to 430 patients over the same timeframe). The difference is much starker when you analyse the number of patients in hospital beds per population, given England’s population is about ten times greater than Scotland’s. The answer seems to lie in the definitions.
