How No 10’s alleged parties took place as UK Covid death toll rose – interactive

The Partygate scandal has been thrown back into the spotlight after the long-awaited privileges committee report announced that Boris Johnson deliberately misled MPs over Partygate.

Previously, Johnson and the then-chancellor, Rishi Sunak, were among 83 people to have been fined by the Metropolitan police over gatherings held while Covid restrictions were in place. Johnson later resigned as an MP when he received the committee’s findings.

The scandal ultimately led to Johnson resigning as prime minister in September 2022, despite his initial claims that “all guidance was followed completely in No 10”.

With more than 228,000 Covid deaths to date, the Guardian plots the UK death toll against dates on which the staff parties are alleged to have occurred, as well as other alleged breaches of lockdown rules and Johnson’s comments on the gatherings.

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Data notes and methodology

UK daily deaths are as recorded by the Office for National Statistics – which includes all deaths where Covid was mentioned on the death certificate deaths to 2 June 2023, as in the most recent publication – and stood at 228,000 people. This time lag means that the graphic remains static for the final couple of weeks of the interactive which does not reflect the actual situation on those days.

This differs to the government’s primary metric sourced from the Covid-19 data dashboard, which only includes those deaths occurring within 28 days of a positive Covid test.

The restrictions level is sourced from the University of Oxford’s coronavirus government response tracker. A stringency index score of above 75 is classed as “very high” restrictions level, above 50 “high”, above 25 “medium” and then anything below is classed as “very low”. From 18 August 2022, the score dropped below 10 which has been classed as no restrictions from then on.