Spectral Analysis Of Certified COVID Death (part 2)

I utilise an engineering tool to investigate periodicity for certified daily COVID death within England for the period 30 January 2020 – 6 October 2023

In part 1 of this miniseries I popped the following paragraph below a slide summarising the new daily death count for certified COVID deaths, as revealed by the UK GOV coronavirus dashboard:

Loud and not very proud is that first sizzingly sharp peak in spring of 2020 when everybody seemed to die synchronously regardless of age, sex, medical diagnosis, immune function, SARS-COV-2 infection, occupation and location – a strange fact that bothers me and certainly bothers the bods at PANDA, with this article being their latest thoughts on the subject.

Regular readers will know that I bang on about the peculiarity of that first spike in COVID deaths every now and then but this morning I fancied trying something that might give us a definitive answer one way or another.

The trouble with this spike is that it is coincident with closure of NHS services, the shunting of frail and elderly people, the introduction of dubious end-of-life care protocols, inappropriate use of ventilation, withdrawal of antibiotics that prevent bacterial pneumonia… and much more. Old folk were isolated - a sure killer - and most people feared for their life to the extent that utterly crazy behaviours ensued. And, yes, some sort of viral-thingy was on the loose (that turned out to be nowhere near as deadly as billed) that somehow managed to put in an appearance during autumn of 2019 if not earlier. Not so novel, then!

The truth of this dark period for centralised healthcare is beginning to emerge, as it surely will, and it looks to me like the murk can’t all be pinned on ignorance, stupidity, political shenanigans and arrogance of those charged with looking after the health of the nation (though no doubt these account for a great deal). It strikes me that if you want to privatise the NHS without public backlash then having it fail in a spectacular fashion sufficient to anger everybody is a good ploy. That being said the global extent of what unfolded should concern us all: in my view we witnessed a blueprint for medical mayhem rather than public health.

Suspicion has built to the point where independent analysts are even questioning the basic data churned out, and rightly so. In this recent article, for example, the PANDA team sketch out an eight-point argument that questions the veracity of the death tally for New York City back in spring 2020 that makes me wonder if other data authorities have also been ‘creative’. It also makes me uneasy because if I can’t trust any numbers from the UK government I might as well turn this publication into one that distributes gluten-free recipes. Those who have followed my work since July 2020 will understand the numerical games that have been played by the authorities - here’s a slide I baked back in December 2021 after yet another run-in with the Office for National Statistics:

An Idea

Whilst watching the rain from the tail end of an Atlantic squall batter down on my office window this morning, being amused by a crow who was trying to crack a snail shell on the cherry tree, I had an idea. A very simple idea, mind, but one that should do the business good and proper!

I realised I could take the daily time series for all adult in-hospital deaths possessing an ICD10 COVID-19 diagnosis that I have been analysing in earnest these past few weeks and convert this into its standard score form. Do the same with the daily count of certified COVID deaths issued by the UK GOV coronavirus dashboard team, get out the crayons, torch the pan and whoosh!!!...

And there you have it – flambéed bananas with roasted hazelnuts, Chantilly cream and chocolate sauce. I reckon this plot tastes as good and it should be pretty clear what it means. It means that the daily profile for COVID death within the NHS Trust that provided my exclusive data dump back in September 2021 pretty much matches the national profile for England as disclosed by the dashboard crew at UK GOV.

This means we’ve either got to go full-on conspiratorial and argue that electronic medical records are being tampered with at the coal face or accept that the UK GOV data might just reflect what actually took place across the nation, strange though that first death spike may be. In the interests of sanity (and the future of this publication) I’m going to assume the latter. Besides which I don’t have that many gluten-free recipes.

Not Off The Hook

Eliminating the possibility of data fraud doesn’t mean anybody should be let off the hook any day soon. In fact, the converse is true because it puts the focus back on iatrogenic death and begs the question of how the national health service could have got it so wrong.

I am sure some readers will be rolling eyes and grunting that the first super spike is simply and purely the wretched Wuhan bat-cum-pangolin soup species-leaping virus all along. What makes me think this is not the case is the following plot:

Here we have the daily tally for 3,412 adult in-hospital deaths over the period 1 Feb 2020 – 10 Sep 2021 whose EPR possessed ICD10 emergency coding for COVID-19 (U07.1; U07.2). All that I have done is to break counts down into cases with mention of a respiratory condition (ICD10 J00 - J99) and those without, these being labelled as symptomatic COVID/asymptomatic COVID accordingly. Just in case some folk are confused I’ll state that an asymptomatic COVID death is somebody who tested positive but who didn’t suffer any form of respiratory condition, no matter how mild.

If we ogle the second and third waves then there is a fairly equal spread of symptomatic and asymptomatic COVID deaths. This sits in stark contrast to that peculiar first wave when asymptomatic COVID death dominated the daily count. Just what was going on during that first wave such that the death tally was dominated by folk without any form of acute respiratory condition such as pneumonia, or chronic respiratory disease such as asthma/COPD? This doesn't make any sense for a respiratory virus alleged to be a new member of the coronavirus family.

Consider also the spread of the second and third waves compared to the temporal precision of that first wave ‘strike’. We have epidemiological precision in the time domain and we have perfect pathological precision in the clinical domain in that non-respiratory in-patients copped the brunt. A respiratory virus at large within the population cannot perform this sort of cock-eyed magic but a misinformed and mismanaged health service sure can, as can anybody pressing buttons for numbers without a comprehensive and transparent audit trail.

If the truth cannot stand up for itself then it is our duty to become conspiratorially-minded, and especially so in an age where the public have been programmed to be adverse to alternative thinking using loaded language and a battery of psychological ploys. People look at me funny when I state that the notion of conspiracy theory is, itself, a conspiracy, hence my use of the phrase Ourobuggered.

I suggest we now take a break and open a fresh packet of biscuits (ideally gingernuts) for next week I shall launch a totally different and lemon-fresh series that looks at the delay from vaccination to death.

Kettle On!