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There are signs that the latest wave of Covid infections may have peaked in children and younger adults, according to scientists tracking the outbreak.
But rates in those older groups most vulnerable to severe disease are continuing to increase in England.
http://archive.today/2022.04.06-115735/https://www.bbc.com/news/health-61002492
UK health and statistics authorities allegedly used 14 inconsistent ways to define fatalities.
Many who died early in the pandemic were never actually tested for the virus while others may have died from something else entirely, according to experts.
…The Oxford study, from 800 freedom of information requests, found some deaths were attributed to Covid just because a care home provider said so and coronavirus was rife.
The report stated: “At the beginning of the pandemic, Public Health England linked data on positive cases to the NHS central register of patients who died.
“This definition meant that a patient who tested positive would be counted as a Covid death even if they were run over by a bus several months later.”
Did official figures overestimate Britain’s grim Covid death toll?
It’s a question that has been asked persistently by medics and members of the public alike almost since the start of the pandemic.
…Last week, in the first of a series of special reports probing the science that has underpinned our pandemic response, The Mail on Sunday set about tackling the ongoing concerns that tests used to diagnose Covid were picking up people who were not actually infected.
The conclusion of some scientists was, yes, they did. And there were those who maintained that despite shortcomings, PCR swabs – used by millions – were accurate enough.
A senior epidemiologist who advised the government during the coronavirus pandemic claims he was told to “correct” his views after he criticised what he thought was an “implausible” graph shown at an official briefing.
Professor Mark Woolhouse has also apologised to his daughter, whose generation “has been so badly served by mine”, and believes that closing schools was “morally wrong”.
The Edinburgh University academic is deeply critical of the use of lockdown measures and says “plain common sense” was a “casualty of the crisis”.
Speaking to Sky News, Prof Woolhouse seemed concerned about a possible “big-brother” approach to the control of information about COVID.He says he was told to watch what he was saying following a briefing given by Chief Scientific Adviser (CSA) Sir Patrick Vallance on 21 September 2020.
Long Covid could be being drastically overreported in children, an official report suggests.
The Office for National Statistics said only one in 100 primary-aged pupils actually have the condition, despite half of parents reporting at least one of its symptoms.
Professor Russell Viner, a member of SAGE and child health expert, said it showed ‘just how common tiredness and headaches are in children’.
The report showed that 47.5 per cent of parents said their child was still battling at least one symptom of the virus 12 weeks later.
But almost the same amount (46.6 per cent) had similar symptoms despite never having Covid. Most common symptoms were a sore throat, lost voice, coughs and shortness of breath.
The ONS estimated that fewer than one in 40 secondary pupils in the UK have long Covid.
“We knew from February [2020], never mind March, that the lockdown would not solve the problem. It would simply delay it,” Woolhouse says, a note of enduring disbelief in his voice. And yet in government, “there was no attention paid to that rather obvious drawback of the strategy”.
Instead, lockdowns – which “only made sense in the context of eradication” – became the tool of choice to control Covid. The die was cast in China, which instituted ultra-strict measures and, unforgivably in Woolhouse’s book, was praised by the World Health Organisation for its “bold approach”. “The WHO,” he suggests, “got the biggest calls completely wrong in 2020. The early global response to the pandemic was woefully inadequate.”
The Government last month signalled its intention to scrap the legal requirement for infected people to self-isolate on March 24, and yesterday it was claimed that it will stop releasing daily Covid updates in April.
…The truth is that the advent of the highly infectious (although markedly milder) Omicron variant has changed everything.
Last week the Case Fatality Rate (CFR) – the proportion of infected people who died of Covid – was hovering at around 0.95 per cent.
That is way below the 15 per cent recorded when the death rate was at its peak in May 2020 when testing was minimal.
And since Monday, when the Office For National Statistics included ‘reinfections’ – people who have contracted the virus more than once – on its daily Covid dashboard for the first time, the CFR has plummeted still further.
With the addition of hundreds of thousands of cases to the weekly total, by Tuesday the CFR had fallen to 0.19 per cent, a percentage akin to that of flu, an illness which currently has a fatality rate of between 0.1 and 0.2 per cent.
The average age of death from Covid, meanwhile, remains at the pre-pandemic 82, with data from the US showing that 75 per cent of people who die with Covid have no fewer than four underlying serious conditions.
Doctors are among the health workers least likely to be vaccinated against Covid-19, while fitness instructors, artists and waiters have some of the highest unjabbed rates overall.
New figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show vaccination rates by profession at the end of last year. The data provides an early indication of which parts of the NHS and social care workforce could be hardest hit by the compulsory vaccination rule that comes into force in April.
Dr. John Campbell seems surprised at the Office for National Statistics Freedom of Information request about deaths from COVID-19 with no other underlying causes.
Daily reported Covid death figures are too high because people are dying from conditions unrelated to the virus after testing positive, Sajid Javid has admitted.
On Wednesday, there were 359 deaths reported in Britain, but the Health Secretary said that “many” people were being included in the count who “would not have necessarily died of Covid”.
His comments came after death data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show a large discrepancy in weekly death registrations compared to the figures released on the Government dashboard.
For the week ending Jan 7, the UK Health Security Agency reported 1,282 deaths of people who had died within 28 days of testing positive for coronavirus.
However, ONS data show there were just 992 death registrations with Covid mentioned on the death certificate in that week.
Covid was not the underlying cause of death in nearly a quarter of virus-related fatalities last week, official figures suggest.
The most up-to-date Office for National Statistics figures showed there were 922 deaths registered in England and Wales mentioned coronavirus on the death certificate in the week to January 7. Of them, Covid was not ruled to be the primary reason for the death in 210 cases, or 23 per cent — although it may have been a contributing factor.
For comparison, the share of deaths not primarily due to the virus stood at around 16 per cent when Omicron first arrived in the UK. With the Alpha wave last January, before the country embarked on its historic vaccination drive, the proportion was about 10 per cent.
The rise of the milder strain has led to a similar pattern emerging in hospitals, where nearly half of virus inpatients are not primarily needing treatment for the infection — compared to about 25 per cent with Delta.
An Office for National Statistics FOI request revealed 6,183 deaths recorded where COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned on the death certificate, between 1 February 2020 to 31 December 2021.
You asked
Please supply deaths caused solely by covid 19, where covid is the only cause of death listed on the death certificate, broken down by age group and gender between feb 2020 up to and including dec 2021.
Please supply the number of autopsies carried out on those where covid was the only cause stated.
We said
Thank you for your enquiry.
We have provided analysis on COVID-19 as the only cause of death by age and sex in England and Wales for your requested time period.
| Age group | Males | Females |
|---|---|---|
| <1 | 1 | 0 |
| 1-4 | 0 | 0 |
| 5-9 | 0 | 0 |
| 10-14 | 0 | 1 |
| 15-19 | 1 | 0 |
| 20-24 | 4 | 1 |
| 25-29 | 12 | 3 |
| 30-34 | 24 | 7 |
| 35-39 | 42 | 15 |
| 40-44 | 52 | 24 |
| 45-49 | 87 | 43 |
| 50-54 | 138 | 52 |
| 55-59 | 234 | 92 |
| 60-64 | 254 | 102 |
| 65-69 | 279 | 119 |
| 70-74 | 357 | 204 |
| 75-79 | 395 | 252 |
| 80-84 | 492 | 402 |
| 85-89 | 470 | 533 |
| 90+ | 520 | 971 |
One of Britain’s most senior health advisers has been accused of disseminating “dodgy data” that inflated the potential risk of omicron.
Dr Jenny Harries, the chief executive of the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), is understood to have been the source of a contested claim by Sajid Javid, the Health Secretary, that there is typically a 17-day lag between patients becoming infected and requiring hospitalisation.
However, independent experts pointed to Office for National Statistics (ONS) data, which suggested an average delay of nine or 10 days.
You asked
Please can you advise on deaths purely from covid with no other underlying causes.
We said
Thank you for your request.…Please see below for death registrations for 2020 and 2021 (provisional) that were due to COVID-19 and were recorded without any pre-existing conditions, England and Wales.
2020: 9400 (0-64: 1549 / 65 and over: 7851)
2021 Q1: 6483 (0-64: 1560/ 65 and over: 4923)
2021 Q2: 346 (0-64: 153/ 65 and over: 193)
2021 Q3: 1142 (0-64: 512/ 65 and over: 630)
The UK is suffering a wave of excess deaths not fully explained by the coronavirus, according to official statistics.
There were 12,050 deaths registered in England and Wales in the seven days to November 12, data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) shows. That was 1,719 more than the five-year average for 2015-19, or a 16.6 per cent increase.
On Thursday, the government published its 44th vaccine surveillance report and in a table on page 18 it noted 2,032 deaths of double-vaccinated individuals over 70. More than 3,000 from the same double-jabbed cohort were hospitalised.
The mortality data for England and Wales from ONS from 1 May 2021 until 17 September 2021 shows a significant excess, particularly in the 15-19 year age group. Depending on the baseline chosen, the excess for 15-19 year olds is between 16% and 47% above expected levels (see table 1 and 2). COVID-19 deaths were too small in number to account for the excess. A disproportionate number of these excess deaths were in males. A certain amount of variation by random chance would be expected but an increase of this proportion is large enough not to be dismissed without further investigation.
…Mortality has risen in younger age groups since 1st May 2021. The increase in the 15-19 year old age group is particularly noticeable, especially as deaths in this age group are uncommon. The excess deaths have a marked male predominance. An increase in ambulance call outs for patients who have had a cardiac arrest or are unconscious showed a coincidental noticeable rise from May 2021. The period also coincides with the rollout of vaccination. Finally, ONS have reported on a striking rise in age adjusted mortality rates in those with only one dose that accelerated in May 2021 to levels far exceeding those in the unvaccinated.
https://www.hartgroup.org/recent-deaths-in-young-people-in-england-and-wales/
Research by an independent statistician, who goes by the pseudonym of John Dee, appears to confirm what many have suspected since the beginning of the Covid-19 pseudopandemic; that the government narrative about the disease is a confidence trick.
John Dee looked at more than 160,000 admissions via the Emergency Department of a busy hospital. His analysis shows that, for an unnamed NHS trust, between 1 January 2021 and 13 June 2021, of the 2,102 admissions coded as Covid-19, only 9.7% (204) had any supporting diagnosis of symptomatic disease.
New figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) have revealed the number of people dying in their homes has risen dramatically over the last 18 months.
At least 70,602 excess deaths in homes were registered between 7 March, 2020 and 17 September, 2021 across England and Wales.
However, only 8,423 (12%) of these deaths involved COVID-19, according to PA news agency analysis of data from the ONS.
While focus remains firmly fixed on Covid-19, a second health crisis is quietly emerging in Britain. Since the beginning of July, there have been thousands of excess deaths which were not caused by coronavirus.
According to health experts, this is highly unusual for the summer. Although excess deaths are expected during the winter months, when cold weather and seasonal infections combine to place pressure on the NHS, summer generally sees a lull.
According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) since July 2, there have been 9,619 excess deaths in England and Wales, of which 48 per cent (4,635) were not caused by Covid-19.