What Was COVID-19, Exactly? (part 1)

In this miniseries I try to fathom what COVID was supposed to be using a sample of 21,810 adult in-hospital deaths over the period 2020/w1 – 2021/w36 for an undisclosed NHS Trust

In my recent miniseries Needle To Door Time I have once again come a cropper in that very little makes sense. We’ve got asymptomatic COVID (non-respiratory conditions with a COVID designation) fetching-up more serious than symptomatic COVID (respiratory conditions with a COVID designation) in terms of risk of early (28-day) death and we’ve got symptomatic COVID cases after their second dose at less risk of early death than non-COVID cases after the same. Talk about topsy-turvy!

This is not the first time the data have not matched the established narrative, nor the second, nor the third. At one point I abandoned diagnostic coding as presented in the EPR in favour of something I called probable COVID, these being predicted values arising from a neural network model. Your best bet for going back over this work is to start with this article and work both forward and backward in time.

So here I am again but this time I’m not simply questioning accuracy in clinical coding, I’m questioning the…