Underlying Cause Of Death (part 1)

Investigation of the hike in care home non-COVID deaths in England & Wales during 2020 (rev 1.2)

In my previous newsletter I added a final section called Fly In The Ointment and reproduce it again here because substack mailout is a one shot system and subscribers don’t get to see revisions unless they actively browse my newsletters online.

A Fly In The Ointment

All this analysis assumes that care homes across England & Wales in early 2020 had access to PCR testing as and when required. Anecdotal evidence coming to me from those in the care sector suggests this was not the case. We must note that physicians could code COVID death merely by scribbling U07.2 COVID-19, virus unidentified on the death certificate. No test necessary! I trust physicians far more than I do the diagnostic test so we may ask why they opted to code these care home deaths as they did given they’d presumably be guided by symptom and clinical course. In this regard we must also note the buzzing in the ointment generated by WHO’s recommendations on death certification:

"With reference to section 4.2.3 of volume 2 …