Underlying Cause Of Death (part 2)

Investigation of the hike in care home non-COVID deaths in England & Wales during 2020 (rev 1.0)

In my previous newsletter we discovered a hike in pneumonia cases coinciding with the hike in care home deaths in England over the period 2020/w13 - 2020/w21. Does this explain everything we need to know?

We may find the answer by subtracting weekly pneumonia care home deaths for England from weekly all cause care home deaths and squinting at the resultant time series:

I’ll take that as a resounding ‘no’, then! Thus, when those certifying physicians declared that hike in non-COVID deaths during early 2020 they weren’t getting confused, neither were they being distracted by PCR test results. These were not miscoded respiratory deaths as some are suggesting, they were something else entirely.

A clue as to what they might have been is provided in tables 7 and 8 of a jolly useful spreadsheet entitled Deaths in the care sector, England and Wales. Table 7: Number of deaths of care home residents by leading cause grouping by sex, England and Wales, registered in 2020 is rather tasty, enabling u…