Dying With Precision: Causal vs. Co-morbid Death

From The Office For Nobbled Statistics...

I’ve been updating my datafiles with the latest figures obtained from UK GOV coronavirus dashboard/ONS and have come across a most curious anomaly. The ONS usefully provide weekly counts of causal and co-morbid deaths for respiratory conditions (ICD10 J00-J99), influenza/pneumonia (ICD10 J09-J18) and COVID-19 (ICD10 U07.1, U07.2, U09.9, U10.9) occurring within England & Wales and I just so happened to pop out a scatterplot for COVID-19 causal against COVID-19 total weekly counts just to get a feel of the relationship. In doing so I nearly blurted out my cuppa!

In the first slide you can see a near-perfect linear relationship between causal and all COVID-19 death. Despite causal being a subset any honest physician will tell you that such perfection is indicative of numerical tripe. Pearson’s correlation coefficient fetches up at a whopping great r = 0.967 (p<0.001, n=50), which is the sort of value befitting the precise realm of atomic physics rather than medicine. My guess is that some…