UK deaths revised to match "Deaths with COVID-19 on the death certificate" on UK COVID-19 dashboard

[CSSEGISandData]

Hello all,

We have recently revised our historical data for UK COVID-19 deaths to match the "Deaths with COVID-19 on the death certificate" metric published on the UK COVID-19 Dashboard. With each weekly update to that dataset, we will back distribute all UK deaths to their date of death (the only date metadata available in this dataset). This is similar to our approach for the US state of Ohio (#3757). We did not make this change lightly and this is the result of several weeks of internal discussions about available paths forward. We made this change for the following reasons:

1. Scotland stopped reporting this metric on June 8, 2022 (source) so we were unable to accurately update deaths for the UK if we continued to use this metric.
2. The previous definition (deaths within 28 days of positive test) was becoming increasingly unreliable and generally limited comparisons with other countries. This was highlighted by New Zealand when they discontinued this metric (as reported in New Zealand deaths overwritten to match new death definition #5942).

Please bear with us as we resolve the discrepancy between our live data and the historical back corrections, which has led to the anomalous drop in deaths on August 22. This was the result of two processes not being synced up as perfectly as we had aimed. Both this historical data and our live data will be patched shortly.

Please let us know any questions.