A Closer Look At Respiratory Death (part 1)

Lessons from an undisclosed NHS Trust

Let’s get stuck straight in with those crosstabulations of respiratory diagnostic group against COVID status at death. It should go without saying that if COVID-19 is held to be a respiratory disease then the certified cause of death should be respiratory, and acute respiratory at that; that is to say, you can’t claim COVID-19 as the underlying cause of death for somebody with mild bronchitis.

Given this basic understanding we can turn to the top section of the attached table to observe 3,435 COVID deaths of which only 1,574 (45.8%) fall into the category of genuinely causal. This is a far cry from WHO/ONS claim that virtually all certified COVID deaths are causal. If we halve their figures we’ll be closer to the truth! I say ‘closer’ because those 1,574 positive-testing acute respiratory deaths may not have actually died from respiratory failure despite being in respiratory distress – there’s sepsis for one thing, plus organ failure including cardiac and neurological causes a well as …