A misleading claim that "only" 17,000 people in England and Wales have died of Covid has been circulating online. The UK's Office for National Statistics (ONS) has stepped in to correct the record - but not before the false claim went viral.

"It has become a weapon of the cruel and heartless to dismiss the deaths of the people we love."

Matt Fowler lost his dad to Covid-19 in April 2020. Ian Fowler was 56 at the time of his death, and lived with type 2 diabetes - which his son said had a "minor, barely perceptible impact on his life that he controlled with his diet".

But the suggestion that "only" 17,000 people in England and Wales have died of Covid - a figure arrived at by removing from the data anyone with a pre-existing health condition - completely discounts the deaths of people like Ian.

The true death toll is more than 140,000, the ONS says. That number is limited to deaths directly caused by the virus, not those "involving" Covid or people who happened to test positive but died of other causes.

There are other ways of calculating deaths by the virus, but all give figures in a similar ballpark.

Kernel of truth

Covid myths that spread on social media very often have a kernel of fact at their heart - a real statistic that gets misused - to tell a story which ends up far from reality. In this case, that information was figures released by the ONS looking at people who died of Covid and who had no other health conditions.

But the false implication made in social media...

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