Spectral Analysis Of Certified COVID Death (part 3)

I put down my engineer’s spectral spanner and collate published evidence of possible foul play during spring of 2020

I had thought I could draw a line under part 2 of this miniseries and launch straight into needle-to-mortuary time a.k.a. survival analysis of the vaccinated using EPR data on five thousand in-hospital deaths from an undisclosed NHS Trust but spring 2020 keeps rearing its queer head. This morning I’ve got Dr Sam Bailey in my inbox asking What Happened In Italy In 2020?, but we should note that Jonathan Engler got there first with a PANDA article dated 12 Sep 2022 entitled: Were the unprecedented excess deaths curves in Northern Italy in spring 2020 caused by the spread of a novel deadly virus? However, the quickest analyst off the block for realising things weren’t adding up as they should was Joel Smalley, who published The Collateral Damage Of The UK’s Response To COVID-19 on 10 June 2020.

Yours truly first mildly queried matters in a Facebook post dated 8 June 2021 when I said:

Clearly something big has been going on but the interesting thing here is that this something big was largely confined to the five week period w/b 28 March – 25 April, with a lesser showing w/b 2 January – 23 January 2021. How is it possible that a novel viral outbreak can be constrained temporally to this extent?

The following day I reiterated my bafflement by saying:

As regards 2020 historic maxima are exceeded between week 14 and 21 and that’s it – weekly deaths after this period bobbed about within the historic envelope. This year only exceeded historic maxima during weeks 3 – 6 and is now bobbling along within the historic envelope. Once again we may ask how a novel virus can act in such a temporally confined manner – were it not for those 8 weeks during spring we wouldn’t have anything to show!

And:

This is quite a powerful visual for it reveals 2021 to be pretty much of a muchness wrt historic trends, with only weeks 14 – 19 of 2020 really doing anything of significance. The ‘pandemic’ – in terms of mortality rate – only lasted 6 weeks at best, after which mortality has been bobbing along within the envelope defined by historic minima and maxima. Neither has the winter of 2020/21 been much to shout about despite concerted efforts by the UK media, HMG and their lackeys to continue to scare the shit out of folk.

But it wasn’t until I turned my attention to care home deaths during August of that year that I started to be deeply troubled. Here’s a slide that blew a fair few minds accompanied by an extract of the words I posted on 7 August 2021:

The third slide is quite something. We now see that the incredible surge in care home deaths during the spring of 2020 wasn’t due to COVID. This is the spike that had been camouflaged by presenting the data as an accumulated series, and this is the spike that shocked me when I unpicked the data. The authorities are going to great trouble to hide the fact that a massive surge in non-COVID death occurred within our care homes during spring of 2020. We don’t see such a surge during the so-called third ‘wave’ of what is going to be seasonal death during the winter of 2020/21, with weekly deaths now running well below the 5-year baseline.

I coined the phrase spring death bump in a substack article dated 22 April 2022, entitled Weekly Deaths Update (part 2) but got rather more into my stride during Weekly Deaths Update (part 3) the following day when I summed some information on Midazolam and finished with the following paragraph:

The spring lockdowns and NHS bed shunting games of 2020 were supposed to save lives but here is stark evidence of an increase in non-COVID all cause death during this period. Somebody needs some serious explaining to do given we were all safely tucked away in our homes learning a musical instrument instead of doing dangerous things like driving. Evidence suggesting a quieter and safer life can be observed during weeks 24 to 30 of 2020 and again during weeks 48 to 51. The year 2020 started out pretty normal, so what non-COVID thing happened during weeks 14 to 18 to generate the worst spring death rate I can muster? My money is on the devastating NHS shake-up leading to dangerous discharge and end of life care pathways for those whose life was not necessarily ending. Throw in closure of diagnostic and elective services, together with the end of General Practice as we know it and there you have it. The phrase we use in the business is iatrogenic death.

Stronger and plainer words fell from my quill in Weekly Deaths Update (part 4):

Like Ada Doom we’ve seen something nasty in the woodshed: a dirty great hike in non-COVID all cause deaths during weeks 14 - 18 of 2020 that we suspect was generated in a most foul manner. Remove this hike and the pandemic evaporates into not much more than seasonal respiratory illness.

A short note was produced on 12 June 2022 entitled What’s With April 2020? that arose from time series modelling that pointed out the peculiarity of this month in a data series dating back to 1970. This was followed the next day by another short note entitled April 1977 & April 2020, which ended rather dramatically:

We see that April 1977 was a problematic month for most of the adult population and I am putting my money on a particularly nasty strain of influenza. In contrast April 2020 only crops up for the most elderly females; whatever was going on for this subgroup was extremely vicious compared to 1977. There is no way this astonishing result can be pinned on SARS-COV-2 because it is too selective, besides which we have April 1977 for comparison to see what a virus will do. Something killed granny back in April 2020 and it wasn’t a virus.

I rammed the point home on 15 June 2022 by reminding everybody once again of the inexplicable care home death spike in this article. Data sources were furnished in this article and our attention was drawn to the peculiar synchronicity across the regions of England and Wales in this short article. On 18 June I kicked off with a three part series entitled COVID & non-COVID Care Home Deaths By Region that took us through statistical evidence of yet more oddity before coming to rest. Professors Norman Fenton and Martin Neil got the ball rolling on 14 Feb 2023 with a cracking piece called The Deadly Initial Spring 2020 Covid Wave (subtitled The Iatrogenesis Hypothesis) that inspired me to pen a résumé of my work in an article of the same name

The matter was pursued in a three part series called Catastrophic Health Collapse that kicked-off on 20 March 2023 that took us through a consideration of standardised excess death and all cause crude mortality using a few different statistical spanners including formalised intervention modelling using ARIMA time series techniques. The upshot of all this was the conclusion that anything approaching what we may call a ‘pandemic’ was that critical 4 – 6 week period during spring 2020. This pretty much wrapped my work up on the matter until today.

Where We Left Off

Where we left off in part 2 of this series was ogling a slide that revealed a sharp excess of asymptomatic in-hospital COVID death during spring 2020 for a sample of 3,412 adult in-hospital deaths over the period 1 Feb 2020 – 10 Sep 2021 that were derived from the EPR of an unknown NHS Trust. We’re talking genuine medical records for individual people (anonymised, of course) meshed in with other Trust systems for patient and contractual management and not some dodgy weekly summary counts provided by the ONS with definitions changing to maximise obfuscation. The weakness of this dataset, however, is going to be in the clinical coding of diagnosis and treatment. This was always a contentious area for many disciplines in my own NHS Trust and every month I’d sit down with the head of IM&T and the head of clinical coding in an attempt to improve matters. For bed management, patient management, strategic planning and costing purposes the data held in the EPR did just fine but we never used it for clinical audit and clinical research – the data for these activities came from specialised clinical databases managed directly by myself and run with the aid of a dedicated input team. I thus have to gnaw my elbow from time-to-time as I try to turn grains of sand into a pearl. Please bear this in mind at all times!

What I am going to do today is break the numbers down to get a better idea of what was going on. So far we’ve looked at symptomatic vs. asymptomatic COVID cases but we ought to also consider respiratory vs. non-respiratory, and chronic vs. acute respiratory. To ease analysis I’ve categorised deaths as non-respiratory, chronic respiratory, acute respiratory and chronic + acute respiratory.

Between 1 January 2020 and 10 September 2021 there were 21,928 adult in-hospital deaths in the sample, with a breakdown as follows:

The predominance of non-respiratory death over this period should not come as a surprise since this category includes the two biggest killers, being cancer and cardiac. Now for the crayons, starting with non-COVID death:

We appear to be looking at a colourful wall of noise! This wild eyeballing is confirmed by Wald-Wolfowitz runs tests that indicate the time series for non-respiratory death (p=0.076), chronic respiratory death (p=0.417) and chronic respiratory with acute respiratory death (p=0.141) can be considered to be random walks. Only acute respiratory death manages to show a non-random character in the distribution of counts over time (p<0.001). Though hard to see in such a busy plot acute respiratory death tends to bunch in certain weeks indicative of seasonal pathogens.

The slide we have been waiting for is this one:

My eyes are immediately drawn to the splashes of red within the first wave during spring 2020, these being what we might call fully symptomatic COVID death since cases testing positive were suffering acute respiratory states. Whether or not these were the direct result of a SARS-COV-2 infection is impossible to say for bacterial opportunism leading to bacterial pneumonia would have been rife, especially following withdrawal of lifesaving antibiotics. Those red peaks may well be iatrogenic death, which is a sobering thought.

Suspicious Minds

This leaves us with those mysterious blue peaks marking out non-respiratory deaths following a positive test result: a most peculiar state of affairs for a respiratory virus. So peculiar, in fact, that I was minded to establish an indicator variable for all in-hospital deaths with a diagnosis of COVID without mention of chronic or acute respiratory states. A button press later and the computer was telling me there were 1,361 of these over the period 1 January 2020 – 10 September 2021. Here’s how these are spread in time:

If there is genuine reason to believe these suspicious (a.k.a. asymptomatic) COVID deaths are a thing then somebody was playing silly buggers during the second and third waves as well as the mysterious first wave. Only an audit of the original casenotes will settle the matter unless there are any whistleblowers willing to testify, for there are those who claim that clinical coding took a hit in quality along with every other clinical service and this is entirely feasible.

Kettle On!