Coronavirus Death Reporting Has Become Dangerously Vague.

Coronavirus Deaths has become too broad of a buzzword, and has become so ubiquitous and vague it’s often meaningless. Why would anybody want to take Coronavirus Death data at face value?

By the time the Coronavirus Death data has moved down the communication chain from the field to the executive offices of institutes, through scientific advisory units and civil service departments, and out into the public domain, via press conferences and the media, the already vague figures are blurred to the point of distortion; pliable enough to make it easy for spin doctors and tabloid reporters, already blessed with metamorphic ability, to bend them ever further out of shape, or, more to the point, shape them into headlines that are control delivery mechanisms.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It is just a fact; the way it is. I have decades of experience as a tabloid reporter and spin doctor. Communications chains exist in all walks of life. The Coronavirus Death data communication chain starts in the field; in hospitals, with death certification, which has never been a precision science, the source of the figures.

I do not believe, for one moment, that doctors issuing death certificates are either writing Covid-19 to inflate the overall numbers of deaths, or deliberately omitting it to play the numbers down. This, in my opinion, does not happen. However, the inherent impreciseness of death reporting, at the source of the figures, is perfect for manipulation.

Why? Because The Office for National Statistics (ONS) data we see reported on Covid-19 deaths uses the ambiguous data on certificates, and individual doctors and coroners are remote from this process. There is also no formal requirement to have a positive Covid-19 test back in order to write this on a death certificate, and sometimes post-mortems pick up problems doctors hadn’t listed at first. This is why measures like overall excess mortality, ranked against a five-year average for that month, are vital in analysing pandemic deaths. Strangely, this highly important factor, is absent, along with context, by the time the Coronavirus Death data has moved down the communication chain and out into the public domain.

According to a source at The Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, a service to support the COVID-19 response, over a third (31%) of deaths for the last 8 weeks of reporting with COVID-19 on the death certificate do not have the disease as even a so-called “section 1” cause of death.

When doctors complete certificates, they are structured with “cause 1a”, directly leading to death, and “cause 1b” and “1c”, representing other causes in that same chain that led to the death primarily cause by 1a. Then there is a “section 2”, for noting conditions contributing to the patient’s overall poor health, such as COVID-19, but not the direct cause of death at the time of their passing. To illustrate with one example, a doctor might write: “1a stroke, 1b hypertension, 1c diabetes, and prostate cancer.”

Of course, COVID-19 may be present on the death certificate as a significant condition contributing to death, but not the underlying cause. Another example would be someone who has developed pneumonia as a result of COVID-19, who dies from acute respiratory distress.

In any case, every doctor is instructed to complete the certificate “to the best of your belief and knowledge”. This means there are times where they are fairly sure of the cause of death, but the definitive test is not yet confirmed or received. A heavy smoker with rapid weight loss and a mass on an X-ray who has died before there was time to get a lung biopsy, for example, might still receive a death certificate stating “1a lung cancer”.

These guidelines are supposed to be, in theory, crystal clear that in such cases these deaths “are not deaths due to COVID-19 and should not be certified as such.” It is a different story in the real world, particularly during a national crisis when the propaganda machine is at full tilt. Little wonder that some doctors take the Coronavirus Death headlines with a pinch of salt. And when you throw COVID-19 into the mix, at a time when the whole system is in chaos, you can see why it is perhaps not sensible to take Coronavirus Death data at face value.