Reporting COVID-19 deaths in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal and the UK

The reporting of deaths associated with the SARS-CoV-2 virus has had a high policy profile during the COVID-19 pandemic. This in turn is related to how deaths are counted. In this paper we focus on six European countries: Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal and the United Kingdom and seek to address the following research questions: How do countries vary in terms of legislative provision, recording of deaths and reporting deaths? And what limits the comparability of data across countries? The methods comprised an analysis of policy documents in each of the six countries. Our findings reveal differences between countries in terms of legislative provision, recording deaths, and reporting deaths. These differences have an impact on the comparability of data on deaths associated with COVID-19 across countries. Our findings suggest that there is a case for data collection and statistics to be harmonised, which would facilitate accurate comparison between countries. However, reporting is also related to testing capacity for COVID-19, so this is not simply a question of comparable data being available, rather a question of the overall functioning of the public health system.