Non-COVID Care Home Deaths

Weekly non-COVID care home deaths in England & Wales 2020-2022 (rev 1.2)

Those who have been following my newsletter series to date will realise something rather peculiar happened during April 2020 that cannot be pinned on COVID or false negative test results, in that we observe a clear and significant single spike in all cause and non-COVID mortality largely driven by excess deaths in 80+ year-old females, the likes of which we haven’t seen since 1977 when the nation was gripped by influenza.

Following a hunch I have been downloading every scrap of data the Office for National Statistics hold on care home deaths and this morning I present some shocking evidence. We shall start with the weekly series for non-COVID deaths for the period 2020/w1 - 2022/w3:

These deaths have been certified by qualified physicians as not being COVID deaths, so let us please dispense with the fallacy that attempts to pin the blame on false negative test results at a time when physicians were highly sensitive to detecting absolutely any sign of COVID. Neither can a false negative test result be age or sex specific (please refer to earlier newsletters). It should be quite obvious that something untoward happened to our elderly care home population during weeks 13 - 19 of 2020 that was never to repeat itself at any point during the developing pandemic, including the mutation into delta and omicron strains.

The following slide reveals the situation in terms of excess death, excess in this instance being the observed weekly count minus the prior 5-year relevant weekly mean:

That close on 3,000 care home residents should have suddenly died within a week from non-COVID causes at a frenzied time of DNR, Midazolam, syringe drivers and ‘Nil By Mouth’ should give cause for grave concern rather than imbecilic hand-waving. Once upon a time we would have held a public inquiry.