Why was the UK Health Security Agency underreporting deaths?

2,714 deaths missed since February

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Yesterday, spotted on the “what’s new” section of the website, the UK Health Security Agency issued this statement.

A “processing error” has meant deaths have been underreported since around February time. This means 2,714 people have not been on the statistics but have now been added retrospectively. Adding these deaths means the graph on Our World In Data looks like this!

This is obviously misleading as all the backlog of deaths have been added in one go. However, this chart by Duncan Robertson shows what the data should have looked like (red line) compared with how it was reported (purple line) and the ratio between these (blue line).

I don’t agree with most things Dr Robertson says but in this case the missing deaths is a curious one. What was the processing error and why did it last for so long?

Is this the Omicron death lag, I have talked about before, showing itself in the UK data?