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England to revise DOWN its Covid-19 death toll by up to 10 percent after bizarre 'counting mishap':
Public Health England [(PHE)] currently counts the deaths of all people who have tested positive for Covid-19 among the coronavirus fatality total whether their death was related to the disease or not, an error which was noted in July, prompting the suspension of the daily death toll and an "urgent review" of protocol.
In other words, as many as 4,170 fatalities could be wiped off England's current Covid-19 death toll of 41,686.
According to reports in UKmedia, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Matt Hancock will bring all coronavirus fatality reporting in line with Scotland and Northern Ireland public health models, wherein a death is marked as Covid-19-related only if it occurs within 28 days of a positive test.
[...]
In England, of all deaths that occurred up to 24 July (registered up 1 August), 49,017 involved #COVID19. For the same period, @DHSCgovuk reported 41,143 COVID-19 deaths https://t.co/hKH0tTRb2W
— Office for National Statistics (ONS) (@ONS) August 4, 2020
If the system is not updated, the total of roughly 265,000 confirmed cases in England would all eventually be counted as Covid-19 fatalities regardless of the actual cause of death.
(Score: 4, Informative) by janrinok on Sunday August 09 2020, @08:04AM (7 children)
Wrong. As it stands, if someone in the UK who has had a positive test for COVID-19 lives for another 50 years and then dies of old age, the current recording method will still report that death as resulting from COVID-19. The last line of TFS states this quite clearly. Neither of the conditions that you 'deduced' cover this problem. The UK problem means anyone who dies following a positive test will eventually be recorded as a COVID-19 casualty. A limit of 28 days, which is in use in some other countries, is being considered as a reasonable 'cut-off' point.
Currently the UK believes that over 4000 deaths that have been attributed to COVID-19 have already been recorded in error, and the situation will only get worse as time goes on. And I for one am wondering how many other deaths worldwide have also been mis-recorded by a similar blanket reporting regime.
Certainly there were reports earlier in the year of the Chinese following a similar recording pattern simply because they were being overwhelmed by the number of fatalities at the time. They simply 'assumed' that every death was as a result of COVID-19.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Sunday August 09 2020, @08:27AM (4 children)
the other part of Runaway's question was "where are the deaths from other heart diseases going?"
if the primary cause of death was Covid, but they already had a heart condition that would have killed them in short order anyway, they won't now be shown as 'heart disease' - they will show up as covid death.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Sunday August 09 2020, @08:52AM (2 children)
And this is where I believe a fallacy in medicine shows up. A death can be caused for multiple reasons, even if any of those singular reasons wouldn't have bumped off the victim. Hence the phrase "Death by a thousand papercuts.". It seems the medical community doesn't fully embrace this idea. And I can understand why -- diagnosis of such a thing would be complicated. But it leaves us with bad reports. And you know what they say in the software community: garbage in, garbage out.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2020, @08:52PM (1 child)
Not sure if this is really a medical as much as a legal issue. There are legal requirements for establishing a single primary “cause of death” that I believe go back centuries in common law, which was originally created for legal reasons (e.g., who may be at fault in a suspicious death, etc.). Most medical researchers clearly understand that there are many contributing factors to most deaths. But a coroner (in some jurisdictions not a medical professional at all) must write something on the legal document on the line “cause of death.”
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Monday August 10 2020, @03:04AM
That's a great observation and I bumped you up a point for it. Nevertheless, I think my point still stands for a good reason.
People tend to think that marriage as a single thing. It's not. It's a legal thing, it's a religious thing, and / or it's a personal thing. If four people say they are married because they clapped their hand eight times, then they are married in the sense at a personal level even if it's not legal. Who am I to say they aren't married? They just can't file their taxes jointly because the state doesn't recognize their marriage. Maybe you don't recognize their marriage either, but why would they care? That's something that they believe.
The same principle applies here. Why would the medical community care about what a governmental agency says? If the medical community really wanted to keep track of how many people died from what (listing multiple causes), they could do it. Granted, it takes money and that's why it won't happen, but they could keep records that are better than a line in a coroner report.
But again, good observation and one I hadn't thought of.
(Score: 2) by dry on Sunday August 09 2020, @07:59PM
Well if they have a heart condition and catch Covid-19 badly and their heart stops, it is still Covid-19 that killed them. It's really hard with advanced medicine to say whether their heart would have packed it in shortly or in a decade.
This brings up another paradox, the better a countries medical care, the more Covid-19 deaths due to all those people being kept alive with their bad heart, stroke survivors, and such who get finished off by the virus. In a more backward health-wise country, those people would already have been dead.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2020, @04:37PM (1 child)
Wrong.....England maybe, but not the UK...
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday August 09 2020, @05:33PM