Do COVID Vaccines Work? (part 8)

I utilise data from an unknown NHS Trust to forge multivariate logistic regression models in the development of a more reliable indicator for COVID status

In part 7 of this series we came to a rather frustrating conclusion that the COVID status flag in the EPR of deceased inpatients (COVID Dx) wasn’t as reliable as it should be. We can see this clearly in the simple crosstabulation below of incidence of respiratory conditions (both acute and chronic) against mention of COVID in the EPR of deceased inpatients aged 18 years and older for the period 2021/w1 – 2021/w37:

Out of a total of 1,437 ‘COVID deaths’ we find 524 (36.5%) without mention of any form of respiratory diagnosis, which puts us on rather shaky ground if we are using COVID Dx to mean genuine respiratory COVID-19 and not some false positive result or, perhaps, a true positive result of a previous infection from which the deceased had recovered prior to death. Historic infection is not what we want when assessing outcomes in relation to vaccination.

We have been sold the idea of COVID-19 as a respiratory disease arising from not just a coronavirus but a coronavirus capable of in…