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 stroke, not to mention iatrogenic causes. Quite a can of worms isn’t it?

The second section of the table provides a crosstabulation of in-hospital deaths involving non-COVID pneumonia (including influenza) against COVID status and we find 26 cases (0.8%) of dubious standing. These are people whose cause of death may have been bacterial or other viral pneumonia and yet the COVID status will ensure automatic certification as such.

The third section of the table provides a crosstabulation of in-hospital deaths involving all manner of bronchial condition (i.e. not lung) against COVID status and we find 167 cases (4.9%) of dubious standing. Cause of death in this case is most likely to have been something else entirely.

The fourth section of the table provides a crosstabulation of in-hospital deaths involving chronic respiratory conditions such as asthma, COPD and emphysema against COVID status and we find 615 cases (17.9%) of dubious standing. That is to say, these long term conditions would likely have been attributed as the cause of death were it not for a positive PCR test result. The automated certification process would have ensured these would have been counted as COVID deaths whether or not this reflected medical reality.

We may conclude that establishing the cause of death is darn tricky business!