[katieHaylor (OP)]

Bill says:

In the UK only the deaths of people who are diagnosed with Covid-19 within 28 days are reported. Does this mean no one dies of it after that?

[Bored chemist]

It's an arbitrary limit.
In the same way that, under UK law, you couldn't murder someone if it took more than a year and a day for them to die.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_and_a_day_rule

[alancalverd]

The statistical problem is that, unless the victim has been completely decapitated or subject to a significant postmortem,  "cause of death"  is a matter of opinion. In many cases COVID victims tend to die with both COVID and some other respiratory infection such as pneumonia which would have been treatable and survivable in the absence of COVID. At the other end of the scale, several people have survived for months on ventilation and died with no other disease than COVID present. If the victim has COVID and there are no suspicious circumstances, nobody is going to want to carry out a postmortem.  So the UK government has adopted an arbitrary definition of COVID death as one occurring within 28 days of a positive diagnosis.

As long as this figure is roughly in line with the seasonally adjusted excess deaths (an entirely credible figure since all deaths from any cause have been recorded for many years) and there is no other significant epidemic, it is an adequate statistic for measuring the effect of whatever preventive measures were in force (or removed) 4 - 6 weeks ago, and we are now reaping the harvest of Christmas.