‘It was this big’: a corrective on COVID-19 mortality

Roger Watson & Niall McCrae

Finding the truth about how many people died of COVID-19 is difficult. Government ministers and scientific advisors, and the mainstream media, portray this virus as an unprecedented killer. Radical interventions have been justified by the enormous mortality (127603 at time of writing). However, we argue that the official COVID-19 death toll, an article of faith for lockdown proponents, is as exaggerated as the angler’s perch: ‘it was this big’.   

Early in the pandemic, sceptics in the UK, aware that the average age at death was 82, wondered whether people were dying ‘with’ or ‘of’ COVID-19. Indeed, any person with a positive test for the virus ever was logged as a COVID-19 death, regardless of whether they had terminal cancer or other primary affliction. A time period was later set at 28 days, cutting thousands of deaths from the total. The testing is known to be problematic, with a high chance of false positives. Diagnosis of COVID-19 by clinical examination, either before or after death, is not straightforward because the symptoms are similar to those of influenza, which kills thousands of elderly every winter.  The NHS website lists the following symptoms suggestive of COVID-19: –

• a high temperature – this means you feel hot to touch on your chest or back (you do not need to measure your temperature)
• a new, continuous cough – this means coughing a lot for more than an hour, or 3 or more coughing episodes in 24 hours (if you usually have a cough, it may be worse than usual)
• a loss or change to your sense of smell or taste – this means you’ve noticed you cannot smell or taste anything, or things smell or taste different to normal.

Fever and cough are ubiquitous for a respiratory virus, but it became widely but erroneously accepted that loss of taste is a distinguishing feature. With a bad cold or flu the palate is less sensitive, partly due to the germs and inflammation. A psychologist remarked to one of us that while the symptoms of COVID-19 are real, some of the perceived taste loss may be due to power of suggestion (a feature of mass hysteria). 

COVID-19 is a disease caused by SARS-CoV-2, a novel coronavirus. Of the many endemic coronaviruses, most are highly infectious but have generally mild symptoms. Early footage from the source in Wuhan gave the impression that the new virus was as deadly as the Spanish flu of a hundred years ago, killing young and old alike, but when it reached Europe it was evident that the victims were mostly the frail and chronically sick. 

Some sceptics doubt the very existence of COVID-19. Virologist Siouxsie Wiles of the University of Auckland, assures us that COVID-19 has been isolated several times and sequenced from many sources, the complete genome of at least one variant having been published. The same objectors cite Koch’s postulates, whereby an infectious agent is only truly identified if it can be removed from one infected source, purified and introduced to another source that ultimately succumbs to the same infection. Koch’s postulates apply to bacteria and have never been applied to viruses.

Putting aside the arguments over whether the virus is real or contrived, whether it had natural or laboratory origin, and whether it was accidentally or deliberately released, there has been much conjecture on the doctors being somehow influenced into recording COVID-19 on death certificates. We have credible clinical sources that support this theory. However, we are not aware of any national or local policy document urging doctors to ‘up the numbers’. Nonetheless, reliance on dubious testing methods, positive results overriding other causes of death, and a symptomatology that could attribute any respiratory infection to COVID-19, inevitably the death certificates will be overly inclusive. Under the Coronavirus Act there is an attenuated process for certifying death and authorising cremation. For thousands of cases, the evidence has gone up in smoke. 

What has the government done to ensure a more accurate count? The policy of registering deaths as being from COVID-19 in people who had recovered and subsequently died from another cause up to a month later has continued. Ministers refuse to consider the impact of false positives (a problem compounded by an excessive amplification of PCR samples, which can detect inactive viral fragments). This leads to exaggerated incidence and mortality and, as explained by Diana Kimpton, the ‘never-ending epidemic’. 

The actual number of people who have died of COVID-19 is impossible to know. According to The King’s Fund on 23 April 2021, ‘Covid-19 has changed the health profile of England’s population radically by becoming the leading cause of death’. But according to ONS data on 22 February 2021 on Deaths from influenza and COVID-19 in 2020 and 2021 the following tally emerges:

• Deaths involving influenza and pneumonia (underlying or secondary cause): 127575
• Deaths due to influenza and pneumonia (underlying cause): 21614
• Deaths involving COVID-19 (underlying or secondary cause): 102554
• Deaths due to COVID-19 (underlying cause): 92913

Taking these figures at face value, clearly deaths ‘due to’ COVID-19 outweigh those due to influenza and pneumonia by almost an order of magnitude. But it is also clear that as an underlying or secondary cause of death influenza and pneumonia outweigh the deaths where COVID-19 was considered a contributing factor. That would, in fact, make deaths involving influenza and pneumonia as underlying or secondary cause of death the largest killer in England and Wales. If the underlying cause deaths—presumably included in the ‘underlying or secondary cause’ deaths—are subtracted from the underlying or secondary cause deaths then the remaining deaths involving either diagnosis looks like:

• Deaths involving influenza and pneumonia (secondary cause): 105961
• Deaths involving COVID-19 (secondary cause): 9641

In other words, deaths where influenza or pneumonia was a secondary cause outweigh those where COVID-19 was a secondary cause by an order of magnitude and still outweigh the deaths due to COVID-19. 

Like the angler who caught something more mundane than a salmon, we speculate that many of the people who supposedly died of COVID-19 succumbed to the same conditions that take thousands of lives every winter: influenza and its sequel of pneumonia. COVID-19 is not so big after all.