[joglynne]

On the theme of what has been counted as a Covid-19 related death the following article published on 16th July by The Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine which is part of the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford, and is led by Professor Carl Heneghan as Director.

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By this PHE definition, no one with COVID in England is allowed to ever recover from their illness. A patient who has tested positive, but successfully treated and discharged from hospital, will still be counted as a COVID death even if they had a heart attack or were run over by a bus three months later.

This why the PHE figures vary substantially from day to day. For example, 16 new deaths were announced on 6th July, but the following day, 152 were reported – today’s figure is 66.

PHE data also confirm that more than 125 000 patients have been admitted to NHS hospitals for COVID, the majority being successfully treated and discharged. There are now less than 1900 patients in hospital. So, roughly 80 000 recovered patients in the community will continue being monitored by PHE for the daily death statistics. More and more people (who are mainly in the older age group) are being discharged to the community, but they clearly may die of other illnesses.

This is why ‘out of hospital setting’ deaths remain constantly high (Figure 1), even though the Office of National Statistics data shows there have been fewer deaths than the five year average in the last three weeks, and NHS England data shows a moving average of 19 deaths per day in hospital.

It’s time to fix this statistical flaw that leads to an over-exaggeration of COVID-associated deaths. One reasonable approach would be to define community COVID-related deaths as those that occurred within 21 days of a COVID positive test result.

https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/why-no...tical-anomaly/