Some truth on numbers. But why is it happening?

[Pootle40]

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9279767/BEL-MOONEY-dad-died-chronic-illness-hes-officially-Covid-victim.html#socialLinks

Many of us have always suspected this but why is it happening and what benefit does it bring? Are other countries doing this?

Unfortunately because he refused the test when symptomatic it can't be proven if he had caught it by then or not.

The list of symptoms attributed to long-covid is growing. My neighbour now has heart problems that were only diagnosed months later. They cannot say for sure if they are a direct result of covid. Some people have died at home without getting a test and medical attention.

There will be a large margin of error in both directions.

What about the people that cannot get the treatment for other serious medical conditions due to the pandemic? Many of those will die that could otherwise have been saved.

It's impossible to quantify exactly. It's also impossible to make accurate comparisons with the figures from other countries since even with the same basic reporting frameworks there will be differences in protocol.

We do know that it is causing a lot of deaths and that there are things we can do to try and reduce that.

It's a margin of error in both directions. When we had a big COVID outbreak on my (geriatrics) ward 2 people got very sick immediately one recovered and one died. The one death will be counted.

However another 2 got a little bit ill with flu like symptoms but they never got back to how they were. They Stopped eating and drinking (maybe altered smell/ taste) and stopped getting out of bed. They are slowly dying which is really sad and heart rending and untreatable. It's going to take longer than 28 days though and their deaths will therefore not be counted but they will have died of COVID as they were old and frail but not dying beforehand. All my colleagues have had similar experiences in care home outbreaks that some people die of respiratory illness straight away but other die slowly and just seem to give up.

Old people never really die of one particular thing. They die of the confluence of a lot of causes so it's usually never really that possible to be certain of one cause of death in an 80 or 90 year old frail person.

The stats are what they are.
Some non COVID deaths might be included but I think many more Covid deaths will be missed.
If they didn't die 'of it' it's still likely it contributed to hastening their deaths.
My lovely mum died of cancer last year. She didn't have COVID but if she had got it I have no doubt at all it would have hastened her death although would not have been the root cause.
You have to put a cut off on it somewhere and as long as you are comparing like with like (which is where caution is required with other countries data) it doesn't matter.

It's just to keep statistics consistent isn't it? So that all trusts are recording the same thing, rather than using their own judgement which will skew data.

Covid doesn't necessarily go down as the cause of death on all these people's death certificates, I don't think, but for the purposes of data collection when it needs to be done on a constant rolling basis, it's much easier to just have a blanket 'if they died within 28 days of a Covid test then they are included in the data' than a 'well, they died of chronic illness but its possible that Covid was an aggrevating factor so do we put it down or not?'. Because then some trusts will record that as a Covid death and some won't, so then the data is skewed. So there has to be an objective, universal rule that everyone is using.

Of course there are all these mythical people who get hit by a bus and die on their way home from the Covid test centre, but they will be such a small number that they won't affect the overall data.

That should say 'if they died within 28 of a positive Covid test'...

And I don't actually know if it's NHS trusts who report the data, but whoever it is!

And presumably the alleged hordes of 'hit by a bus' people will NOT have COVID in their death certificates because Drs are not idiots or being paid to write it so the death certificate data will be correct even if the 28 day data is not.

It's actually more likely that a COVID infection more than a month prior will not be recognised as contributing to cause of death when it did than that a person will be falsely recorded on their death certificate as COVID contributed.

Death certificates have a number of spaces BTW and usually a few different diagnoses that contribute are recorded. If I was the guy in the care home's GP I'd have written Covid as the primary cause too but also put down COPD and vascular dementia as underlying causes. That's normal practice.

Cause of death is almost always a best guess ie an assumption and not a 'diagnosis' unless they wanted a PM for their 99yr old dad.