100,000 COVID Deaths?

The media was full of stories, yesterday, continuing today, that Britain has now had more than 100,000 deaths FROM COVID19.  Except, of course, its not true.  What the data shows, if you read, or listen carefully to the small print that is glossed over in those stories, is that there have been more than 100,000 deaths of people WITH Covid.  Every day, there are thousands of deaths of people who have some disease or other, but which is not the cause of their death.  So, too with COVID.  Yet, as with the reporting of COVID from the start, it is all presented so as to portray the worst possible version of the facts.  That, in itself, should provoke anyone with an enquiring mind to ask why.

What do the released figures for COVID deaths actually tell us?  The truth is, nothing particularly useful.  As Disraeli once said, "There are lies, damn lies and statistics."  Bad information is worse than no information, because it leads to people drawing false conclusions, and so taking unjustified actions.  The data on COVID deaths tells us only this - on any given day, so many people died, who within the previous 28 days had also had a positive test for COVID.  Nothing more.

If at some time in the last 28 days, person A has a positive test for COVID, and yesterday, whilst out running a marathon, they get hit by a bus, or suffer a heart attack, then their death will show up in the COVID death statistics, despite the fact that their death had absolutely nothing to do with COVID.  The data tells us only the number of people who died from whatever cause, who coincidentally also had had a positive COVID test.  It most certainly does not tell us how many people died as a result of being infected with COVID.  Now, you could be forgiven for not realising that, because the wall to wall, dawn to dusk lockdown propaganda, most certainly does not provide you with that information, required if you are to have any chance of making sense of the data.

Of course, no one is suggesting that the 100,000 people who have died WITH as opposed to FROM Covid, have all died from being hit by a bus.  There are not that many such road accidents in a year.  But, that example, simply shows the extent to which the actual COVID death data itself is meaningless.  If not from being hit by a bus, then someone might die from a heart attack, or from a long standing cancer - particularly as cancer treatments have been cut back severely, as everything has been devoted to COVID.  In fact, deaths from cancer ae a case in point, because each year, around 80,000 people, in Britain die from smoking related illnesses, and many of those deaths will be due to cancer, or related heart attacks, and so on.  If only half of those 80,000 people who actually died from cancer also contracted COVID - a high probability of which exists due to the NHS being the largest single source of COVID infections - having gone into hospital, then in reality, the number of COVID deaths would be reduced by 40,000, from the headline figure.

In fact, every year, 320,000 people come down with some serious illness, related to smoking.  If only a quarter of those also contracted COVID, and half of those died, actually from their smoking related illness, as a result of the NHS not providing treatment, or because people stayed away from hospitals out of a rational fear of the NHS infecting them with COVID, then that would be another 40,000 people who died from illnesses other than COVID, but whose deaths would appear in the COVID statistics.  Is that the case?  Who knows, because the statistics do not actually tell us, instead all of these deaths, from a wide range of causes are simply lumped together, and portrayed as COVID deaths!  Of course, even so, and after a year of all this, we are still at only a fifth of the 500,000 deaths that the team at Imperial College said could occur from COVID in Britain, just as globally, the number of COVID deaths is at around 2 million, compared to the 45 million the Imperial team forecast.

But, let's continue to investigate the UK figures.  We know that the average age of those dying allegedly FROM Covid, but which is actually only WITH Covid, is 82.  In other words, the average age of those dying is greater than that of the average life expectancy for a person in Britain.  Again, for anyone with an enquiring mind, this should set of an overture of alarm bells about the nature of the statistics.  More than half he people dying are aged over 80, the largest proportion of those over 85.  So, many of these people, just as with those suffering from terminal cancer, will be people who were dying anyway, from some other cause, be it dementia, some form of cancer, chronic heart disease, or whatever.  The fact that some of them also in the last 28 days got a positive COVID test, would have had nothing, or virtually nothing to do with their actual cause of death, particularly as a large proportion of them would have been infected with COVID after having gone into hospital, or who were eking out their last days in a care home.

In the last 6 weeks, of the people being treated for COVID in NHS hospitals, 11,000 of them were infected with the virus after they went into hospital for some other cause.  before Christmas, it was announced that 25% of those being treated for COVID in hospital, had actually been infected with it after they went into hospital for treatment of some other complaint.  That is not counting the thousands more people the NHS has infected with COVID, but who did not require treatment for it.  If the NHS is spreading COVID at that kind of rate in the supposedly sterile conditions of its hospital wards, the amount of infection at walk in centres, Out-Patients facilities, and so on must be even greater.  Then, of course, the NHS has sent thousands of people it knew had COVID back to Care Homes, when they spread the virus amongst vulnerable populations, the number it sent back with COVID, unknowingly, will be greater still.

Just looking at the fact that the average age of death of 82 should tell us that the likelihood is that a large proportion of thee deaths were from other causes, and that, at best, COVID was a contributory factor, or it may have been no factor at all.  After all, 80% of people, mostly those under 60 have virtually no symptoms from COVID, but even amongst the other 20%, not all of them die, or even have life threatening illness.  Even amongst the 20% of the population actually at risk from COVID, the percentage that die is only around 1-2%, meaning the other 18-19% don't.

So, it should be little surprise that we have seen such a sharp uptick in the number of deaths being attributed to COVID in the last few weeks, despite the fact that we have had a continuous lockdown of some sort for the last year, and a more intensive lockdown in the last few weeks.  Why?  because, at this time of year, the number of deaths from all causes rises sharply, with or without there being COVID.  The sharp rise in deaths over the last few weeks is simply evidence of the fact that the large proportion of deaths being attributed to COVID are nothing of the kind, but are the normal rise in deaths seen during the Winter.  All that is different, this year, is then those dying from chest infections, dementia, Alzheimer's, pneumonia, or from having fallen and broken a hip and so on, may also have been tested positively for COVID at some point in the last 28 days.  They may well have contracted it after going into hospital for one of these other causes.

Has no one actually wondered why we have seen such a sharp rise in deaths over the last few weeks of Winter, even compared to the peaks of deaths back in April of last year, and despite the fact that, we have a comprehensive lockdown in place, we have better medical treatments for COVID and so on.  Indeed, if all these deaths really were attributable to COVID, rather than to the wide range of causes of death of particularly older people, which occur every Winter, then it would again be an indictment of the strategy of lockdown, which failed to stop COVID throughout last year, led to the virus hanging around for longer, by preventing the development of herd immunity, led to its mutation into more virulent strains, and is again now failing to tackle the virus.

Again, we don't know how many of these deaths are caused by these other conditions rather than COVID, because the data does not tell us.  It simply lumps them all together under the label of COVID, simply on the spurious basis that at some point in the previous 28 days, the person who died had also had a positive COVID test.  So, the data is useless for analysing what is actually going on, or for being able to make any sensible policy decisions from it.  For all we know - though its obviously very unlikely - the large majority of those that died were hit by a bus, and so the policy response ought to be something to do with road safety rather than lockdowns.  A ridiculous example, of course, but one designed simply to show that you cannot make sensible policy decisions on such flawed data.  Yet, of course, the media, blazen these headlines without any kind of analysis of the reality that lies behind them.  Instead, we get the usual lockdown propaganda stories of anecdotal evidence of younger people suffering with COVID, despite the fact that all the data, even allowing for these deficiencies, shows that the proportion of young people dying or becoming seriously ill from COVID is vanishingly small.

What we are seeing is the usual seasonal spike in deaths and serious illness that happens every Winter.  The majority of those that die or suffer serious illness, during this time of the year, are the elderly and otherwise vulnerable.  Often, those groups do not die from flu, because of having annual flu jabs, but they die from all these other causes, including pneumonia that arises as a secondary factory, a a result of chest infections, having fallen over and so on.  In fact, a look at the data, again shows, far more people in the younger age groups dying from flu, currently, than from COVID, illustrating this point.  Of the older people, many will also have been infected with COVID, many of them after they went into hospital for other reasons.

Last year, the spike in COVID deaths subsided sharply in the Spring and Summer, again showing that same seasonal characteristic, a seasonal characteristic not of COVID, but of deaths and illness from other causes that is being cobbled together with COVID deaths in the statistics on a thoroughly spurious basis.  We need much better data, and much less wall to wall propaganda, and media sensationalism.