@scottorandojin What if the false diagnosis rate was 90%? D…

@scottorandojin To exemplify: the NHS is under severe winter pressure. Many staff are unavailable, largely due to forced isolation from testing. Also, I’m told the adaptations to the conditions make normal work almost impossible. Trying to keep apart patients in different categories must be...

@scottorandojin ...incredibly stressful. I doubt I could ever have coped. Add to this the real stream of sick people & it’s a complete nightmare. My sympathies won’t be accepted but I offer them anyway. As to “the deaths”, do you mean the reported count of “covid19 deaths”? Everyone is doing...

@scottorandojin ...their very best. But as to that count: it’s nothing to do with clinical judgement. A covid19 death is a death from any cause within 28d of a positive test. So once a person is labelled by a positive test, if they then die, they’re a covid19 death. Back to my substantive...

@scottorandojin ...question: how reliable is that labelling? It’s not a clinical diagnosis. We’re not used to this idea. Never before in medical history has someone had a disease (let alone cause of death) been defined by the result of a single year alone. Yet that’s where we are. I think that..

@scottorandojin ...is absurd & kafkaesque. I recall Whitty saying many months ago that the true way to evaluate when a pandemic (epidemic, etc) comes to an end is when excess deaths reduce. I would add the caveat that we’ve chosen to restrict access to medical services for almost nine months...

@scottorandojin ...now. We’ve seen large falls in all sorts of referrals for cancer, heart disease and the like. I don’t think anyone expects that to do anything but to steadily push up all-causes mortality. Yet it will do so in a gradual way. It would not be apparent in the way respiratory...

@scottorandojin ...virus epidemics show themselves in the excess deaths record, which is a spike. Instead it’ll be a slow, inexorable rise. I fear that is what we’re largely seeing now. I say this because recently, the PHE weekly record of all-causes mortality definitely isn’t spiking, in the...

@scottorandojin ...way we’d expect if there were thousands of correctly diagnosed deaths from a contagious respiratory virus. Here are the last two weeks. Worth reading the short narratives.

@scottorandojin Surely, if the thousands of recent “covid19 deaths” were all correctly attributed, there must be quite a pulse of excess all-causes mortality?
I expect the ‘wait two weeks’ warning will be given & I do worry about that. Nothing in this mornings tweets asks anyone to do...

@scottorandojin ...anything except to think & to ask questions.