A State of Fear: How the UK government weaponised fear during the Covid-19 pandemic - Laura Dodsworth (the first e reader .txt) 📗

for excess death and told me, ‘For every Covid death we would estimate another four deaths over two to five years, and that is how we plan body storage. You see extra deaths for domestic violence and obstetrics, delayed or missed oncology diagnosis, no admission to A&E, sepsis and suicide.’

I was surprised by Easthope’s foreknowledge of non-Covid excess deaths and asked if it’s seen as inevitable: ‘The disruption that a pandemic causes means that people who would have died over the next five years will be brought forward. This has been made worse by a vigorous and long lockdown.’ So, should we have locked down? She was cautious, and said, ‘The virus is nasty and it must be respected. Some social changes would be essential, but otherwise I would advocate business as usual. The idea that essential civil function and hospitals would shut is incredible. In a pandemic you plan to keep as much open as possible.’

Although lockdowns seem to be accepted by the government officials, the media, and therefore the wider public as orthodoxy, the shocking truth is that they are not orthodox. They were specifically not recommended in the UK or the WHO’s pandemic plans prior to 2020. There is more on this in the essay ‘Lockdowns don’t work’ in Appendix 2.

I spoke to a coroner (who did not wish to be named) who confirmed that the UK quickly increased mortuary capacity. They thought the lockdown and changes to death registrations were necessary when knowledge was scant and the system was threatened by having to house and process 500,000 bodies. As it turned out ‘the epidemic was essentially the sort of pressure we get over a normal winter. It was way less than what we had planned for.’

The anonymous special scientific advisor also told me they warned at SPAD and senior civil service level that there would be severe consequences for excess deaths if the country locked down. ‘Lockdown was not the way to go,’ they said. ‘Bluntly, you should try and power through an epidemic. Lockdown was obviously going to tank the economy. We have never trained for a lockdown like this. You don’t do it for a coronavirus. I’ve been through all my papers. It’s just not something we do.’

Except we did. The difficulty now is that although death totals are confidently asserted, the relaxation of the death registration in order to cope with the worst case scenario means we don’t really know how many people have died of Covid.

Where once a doctor had to have seen the deceased within 14 days of death to sign off a death certificate, now it is 28 days, although according to the coroner both are arbitrary numbers. And in a time of social distancing, what does ‘seeing’ actually mean? It might be a Zoom appointment or telephone call. The coroner told me an apocryphal story about a family holding a dead body up to a window so the doctor had ‘seen’ the body. He wasn’t entirely sure whether the story was a joke or not.

Also, if the deceased’s doctor is not available, then any doctor can issue the death certificate. The doctor need not see the body, but can speak to people who have seen the deceased and use the medical notes. Remote verification of the body is even possible by someone who is not a medical professional,1 although they should usually be independent of family members. The coroner told me that in his view ‘it was entirely the right decision to make based on the information we had and would work if backed by a functioning Medical Examiner system.’

The problem is the UK does not have a functioning Medical Examiner system. It was being rolled out in England and Wales to add a safeguarding scrutiny to non-coronial deaths and improve the quality of death certification. A second, more senior doctor should agree the proposed cause of death. This would mean some arbitrary rules like 28 days or 14 days since seeing the deceased could be relaxed, and it should also safeguard against another Harold Shipman. The implementation varies across different hospital trusts, there is no software yet to manage it nationwide, and the senior doctors who should act as Medical Examiners were called to frontline work during the epidemic. Worryingly, according to the coroner, ‘At the moment we are not set up to prevent another Harold Shipman.’

The anonymous scientific advisor was frank about the result: ‘We have no idea how many people died because of this disease, or poor clinical decision-making in the early days, or neglect in care homes.’

Easthope told me that ‘death scientists noted immediately that the Coronavirus Act had been framed to take away all the problems we found in exercises like Cygnus, but by doing that also stripped a load of safeguards and protections for the dead and for death data. We have a crisis in death recording. For the first time in 50 years of slowly improving death registration we’ve lost our ability to differentiate the cause of death. It surprised me that the “no confirmatory death certificate’” was in the Coronavirus Act. I think that should only have been enacted at a certain threshold. In other plans that we’d done, the idea that death scrutiny would be one of the first sacrifices was an anathema.’

24,7092 deaths occurred in care homes in England and Wales in 2020 and up till 22 January 2021, nearly a quarter of the total Covid deaths, and approximately another 4,8103 care home residents died with Covid after being transferred to hospital up to 20 June 2020. Another 1,419 have died in hospices. It’s hard to see how deaths in hospices can be attributed to Covid, and there is uncertainty about some care home ‘Covid deaths’ actually being due to Covid.

I spoke to a care home worker in the north of England confidentially to discuss this problem. They had cases where Covid had been inaccurately put on the death certificate as the cause of death or an underlying cause