A Closer Look At Respiratory Death (part 5)

Lessons from an undisclosed NHS Trust

In part 3 of this series we discovered that none of the 1,574 symptomatic COVID deaths over the period Feb ’20 – Sep ’21 could be attributed to SARS-COV-2 infection alone, and we were dunked into the murky tank of multicausal death. A bar chart was produced revealing the distribution of co-morbidities along with the fact that 67.4% of symptomatic COVID deaths exhibited medical records with three or more additional diagnoses, and a staggering 91.2% of symptomatic COVID deaths exhibited patient records with two or more additional diagnoses.

I mentioned that these co-morbidities could be minor (e.g. high blood pressure) or major (e.g. stroke), the latter being a candidate for co-causal death. I have thus spent some time sifting through 2,334 diagnoses and flagging anything major yet non-traumatic that could be considered co-causal.  Examples are acute renal failure, acute hepatic failure, cerebral infarction, transplant failure, multi infarct dementia, malignant neoplasms and septic shock…