Synchronicity of Deaths in the Pandemic
In preparation for the upcoming inquiry, Carl Heneghan has been asked to appear in person and has already submitted written evidence – in preparation, we’ll be looking at a host of issues that might come up.
Something has bothered us for quite some time – the unprecedented rise in deaths in the spring of 2020. To look at the issue, we used the ONS registered data for 2020 that reports monthly deaths by county.
Notice anything?
Synchronicity is the simultaneous occurrence of events which may or may not be related but have a connection. By the end of 2020, deaths were asynchronous, but in April, all counties in England had synchronous rises.
To further look at the data in depth, we analysed NHS England’s daily hospital data on deaths for 2020. This shows a synchronous wave of deaths starting in March and peaking on the 8th of April across all seven regions.
Contrast this with the end of 2020 when The North West, North East and Midlands peaked earlier than London and the South East.
We might all agree that the waves of excess deaths in the Spring of 2020 set the tone for many of the policies that followed in the pandemic.
The ONS data for the week ending the 17 of April 2020 showed a steep increase in deaths, with 22,351 occurring, an excess of 12,034 for the week.
The highest number of previously recorded deaths (we are aware of) occurred in week 52 of 1999, when 18,500 deaths were registered in that week.
In 2020, we also looked at the excess deaths in England and Wales from week 10 to week 16 and asked were the excess deaths due to covid. Of all the excess death in these six weeks, 29 percent (n =7916) did not mention COVID on the certificate – so we can tentatively say that roughly one-third of the excess deaths were not caused by covid in the early phase of the pandemic.
We say “tentatively” because previously, we have pointed out the errors in assigning causation and that UK public health and statistical organisations operate under 14 different definitions to classify a death from Covid.
So what are we to conclude? There was a steep unprecedented rise in deaths from the end of March to mid-April 2020. The increase was synchronous, suggesting either the virus struck at precisely the same time across England or other factors were at play.
By searching PubMed, we found a couple of studies on transmission synchronisation. A Brazilian analysis showed transmission between cities seems to be linked to the transport network (highways and airways), and the distance between cities is not a barrier to the spread of covid.
Previous studies have shown that incidence and mortality data for covid in the US oscillated periodically, mainly due to differences in testing and reporting of deaths. While both might explain some transmission synchronicity, they cannot fully account for the rise in deaths.
We also found one study relating to covid deaths and synchronicity. John Ioannidis published the over- and under-estimation of COVID-19 deaths – So maybe we are on to something interesting.
‘The ratio of COVID-19-attributable deaths versus “true” COVID-19 deaths depends on the synchronicity of the epidemic wave with population mortality; duration of test positivity, diagnostic time window, and testing practices close to and at death; infection prevalence; the extent of diagnosing without testing documentation; and the ratio of overall (all-cause) population mortality rate and infection fatality rate.’
Ioannidis also points out that most deaths occur in people with underlying comorbidities and that dissecting the relative contribution of each condition to death is complicated. Therfore, as John says, ‘Finally, excess death estimates are subject to substantial annual variability and include also indirect effects of the pandemic and the effects of measures taken.’ Something we’d agree with.
This steep rise and fall in transmission is a hallmark of acute respiratory infections. However, we can still not separate the effects of any agent from those of human interventions such as the panic and shutdown of services.
Deaths may be in those who “tested positive”, but they may be in those rushed to hospital who underwent inappropriate, invasive procedures or iatrogenic causes were exposed to high concentrations of the agent whilst an inpatient or admitted to a nursing home and abandoned.
Towards the end of the year, a different pattern emerged, with hospital deaths seemingly tracking the rise in infections. We also learnt that rates of hospital-acquired infections were extremely high, and they impacted the most vulnerable, leading to considerable mortality.
Can we determine the indirect effects of the pandemic and the impact of the measures taken?
The answer is not without an in-depth investigation that requires reviewing individual cases’ medical notes.
The cost to society and the impact on people’s lives means such an investigation should be a mandatory part of an inquiry.
See more here substack.com
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Carmel
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How accurate is the reporting system?
How many of the deaths reported might have occurred outside of the time period in which they were reported?
Is it possible that we are perhaps looking at the creation of false peaks that might otherwise iron out the mortality troughs that sometimes precede or follow a peak if the reporting of mortality data were by date of death rather than the date it was reported?
It would be interesting to know if the actual official registered dates of death ‘synchronise’ with the time period of a mortality peak.
In other words did all the deaths recorded within a mortality peak actually occur within the published timeframe of that mortality peak?
Are there also perhaps lags for various reasons in the reporting of mortality data that might cause the presentation of data as published to actually be skewed?
What also has to be taken into consideration are the Macro Trends for the U.K. and specifically the UN projections for the U.K. death rate to continue to increase significantly until around 2060.
One has to ask how many of those increased UN projected deaths in the U.K. might be due to factors such as a naturally ageing population, any lowering of the age of life expectancy, pollution, poverty, fuel poverty, poor health care system etc.?
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/GBR/united-kingdom/death-rate
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