Spectral Analysis Of Certified COVID Death (part 4)

I put down my engineer’s spectral spanner and provide evidence of a worsening situation with regard to symptomatic COVID. Are the vaccines at fault?

Once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away a motorcycle courier would be sent from Westminster out to my establishment with a Ministerial dispatch box strapped to their back. Inside would be what we used to call a ‘green jacket’, being the official government folder for the handling of a parliamentary question (‘PQ’ in the lingo). Whenever a PQ arrived the relevant section had to down tools and attend to the document without delay. It was all rather exciting, though the pressure was immense since we had to draft a response that would be read out in the afternoon session of the lower house by the Minister or Secretary of State. Usually we had 3 – 4 hours to get something on paper, and this often involved rapid analysis. Back when I was a SSO all I had to do was crunch the numbers and my PSO did the tricky bit of putting the words in the Minister’s mouth. When I became PSO and shouldered that responsibility myself it wasn’t as much fun, though I could puff my chest up and ask my section to tune in to the BBC broadcast whilst sipping their tea.

These days if I try to rush something out the wheels tend to fall off. Apart from typos, axis labels and titles can get scrambled and slides omitted altogether. Sometimes I’ve used the wrong sample and so all the numbers and tables have required revision. On the rare occasion I’ve even had to delete an article because I’d gone down the wrong alley. Thus please do bear in mind that my publications are rather raw and unedited, and are akin to the rough sketches made in pencil by an artist before they commit to oils.

The Rise Of Symptomatic COVID

This morning I am going to bolt on a few extras to this series that had skipped my mind, starting with an apology to Joel Smalley for not flagging up his contribution dated as far back as 10 June 2020 entitled The Collateral Damage Of The UK’s Response To COVID-19. If anybody has been on the case throughout this global fiasco from day one then it is Joel and if you’re not reading his words then you should. He doesn’t mince them or dress them in fancy filo like I am wont to do! Joel also suggested that I look at the ratio of asymptomatic to symptomatic COVID in-hospital death, so without further do here is a slide that does something similar:

My first words uttered were, “hello, hello, hello, what’s all this then?” which makes me sound a bit like a British Bobby of yesteryear. Policing is what is certainly required, not just of data, but of healthcare policies at local and national level because this slide tells us something is very wrong. How is it possible that symptomatic COVID only accounted for 40% - 60% of all COVID in-hospital deaths in this NHS Trust during that critical first wave? Were they making things up? Abusing the PCR test, perhaps, or deliberately coding for COVID as some whistleblowers have confided?

And how about that elevated rate for symptomatic COVID death since vaccination kicked-off in 2020/w50 – isn’t the magical elixir supposed to be reducing severity of symptoms?

To get some summary stats down in stark B&W I decided to slice this time period into three chunks:

1. First wave (2020/w6 – 2020/w34)

2. Second & third waves pre-vaccine (2020/w35 – 2020/w49)

3. Post vaccine period (2020/w50 – 2021/w36)

Then run out some nice and easy-to-understand averages:

Bizarrely, we observe the highest mean rate post-vaccination rollout (69%) and the lowest mean rate during that rather strange first wave (54%). If the SARS-COV-2 virus was mutating into more virulent but less lethal strains as claimed then this may explain matters, at the same time indicating that the phrase ‘COVID death’ is pretty much meaningless. Then again the highest rates for symptomatic COVID death in the rollout period point a bony finger of suspicion at the vaccines – aren’t they supposed to be alleviating severity?

As a matter of interest I decided to flag all adult deaths tagged with COVID as the one and only diagnosis and discovered 88 such deaths among 21,928 (0.4%) over the period 1 January 2020 – 10 September 2021. Thus we see that it wasn’t COVID alone that was killing people, and that’s before we get into the thorny subject of whether SARS-COV-2 was actually inducing COVID-19 symptoms or a mere bystander.

When it comes to assessing vaccine benefit in a rather crude topline-numbers manner the table above shouldn’t really be used for a number of reasons. For starters we’re not comparing the same seasonal period, so let’s re-jig the date ranges to do just that:

Some sharp readers are bound to ask why there are only 23 observations for the first wave instead of 29 (who know who you are). The answer is that a zero weekly COVID death count will generate missing values as we fly off to infinity. Putting that wrinkle aside we observe two very different mean rates of 0.54 (54%) for the first wave and 0.72 (72%) for the corresponding period during 2021, this difference being hugely statistically significant (p=0.006, paired samples t-test).

Why?

Given we are assuming an awful lot in terms of a level playing field what we can do is acknowledge the limitations of this analysis and ask why we are seeing such a difference if the vaccines are working as claimed and if SARS-COV-2 has been mutating as claimed. Why are proportionately more symptomatic COVID in-hospital deaths being identified post-vaccination rollout and after the passage of the first lethal wave of an alleged novel and deadly virus? Surely these numbers should be the other way round!

Several explanations come to mind:

• The mRNA vaccines are inducing COVID-like symptoms.

• The mRNA vaccines are being taken up preferentially by those with extensive comorbidities.

• In-patients are being mismanaged on the basis of vaccination status.

• The first wave was characterised by false positives with indiscriminate testing.

• The first wave was characterised by inappropriate/knee-jerk clinical diagnosis.

• Physicians have been getting better at diagnosing genuine COVID.

But I am sure that readers will think of a few more! Whatever our favoured explanation what we are facing here is not a good thing because we can’t easily dial-up data to understand what went on. We are up an epidemiological gum tree without a paddle and the question I keep asking is why wasn’t the most significant health issue of recent decades taken seriously in audit terms from the outset?

How is it possible that we are swimming in meaningless numbers? I can only conclude that this whole sorry mess is deliberate obfuscation by those who already knew the virus was not novel and not deadly, except for those who were already very ill indeed.

Kettle On!