How does a frail, 99-year old man with COPD and 3 negative tests end up in the Covid-19 death stats?

Abridged from Bel Mooney's article in the Daily Mail, 20th February 2021

A week after his death, my father's few possessions came back from the care home, kept there in case of 'infection'. Yet I was told that he had died in his sleep.

Dad had been visibly fading for months. His cough — a result of long-standing chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) — was worse, and so were his frustrated moods and confusion, caused by vascular dementia.

You long for the person you love to have peace, yet the finality of death makes you cry. But here on my desk, his official death certificate ignites that sorrow into anger. This is not because Ted Mooney contracted coronavirus in the very good (and expensive, it must be said) care home three miles from our house, as statistics will now state. Because he did not. Yet the principal cause of death is set down officially as Covid-19 — and that, in my view, is a bizarre and unacceptable untruth.

You read of such things, but — dazed by an accumulation of figures, as we have all been for nearly a year — you can fail to take them on board.

Why would the public imagine what I now fear, namely that the way Covid-19 death statistics are compiled might make the numbers seem greater than they are?

It is a bitter irony to our family that, because of the ways in which Public Health England and the Office for National Statistics list data related to Covid and deaths, we are deprived of the happy certainty that Dad died peacefully in his sleep.

Equally ironic is that this blameless man — 99 and very frail — had always refused to accept coronavirus existed, even though I had tried patiently two or three times a week to explain that it did. 'What is this plague?' he'd ask crossly, peering (blind in one eye, macular degeneration in the other) at the TV news. And now he is just another one of their statistics. Believing all along that we were being lied to, he has (in a strange way) been proved right.

I do not believe in conspiracy theories. Nor do I have any doubt that a pandemic called Covid-19 afflicted the world more than a year ago, causing fear and death. And yet, confronting the timeline of my own dear father's last weeks on this earth, I feel as bewildered as I am angry.

Why would a country wish to skew its mortality figures by, I believe, wrongly certifying deaths? What has been going on?

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Obeying the latest local authority rules, the home closed itself off to visitors. I felt terrible.

On January 12, they tested Dad for Covid again. It was negative. On January 26, I had an email from the experienced male nurse in charge of the dementia patients, saying that once again Dad had tested negative. But a phone call from another care worker gave disappointing news that 'Mr Ted' had refused the vaccine.

On the next day, January 27, we learned there had been an outbreak of Covid in the home among staff and residents. I was in constant phone contact with helpful care workers who told me Dad was spending most of his time in his room, sleeping a lot and off his food. My heart warned me he was reaching the end of his life.

On Monday, February 8, Dad's care worker called to say she had summoned a GP because he was 'chesty'. As he had COPD, this was no surprise. The GP wanted to test for Covid again but Dad refused. I think he'd just had enough by then. So antibiotics were prescribed and the care worker telephoned again early that evening to reassure me he had gone quietly to bed.

My father did not wake up. The 8am call on February 9 informed us that Dad had died in his sleep.

That night, the GP who had seen Dad the day before and was called to certify his death kindly telephoned to express his condolences. He told me that, apart from the chestiness, Dad seemed 'well cared for'.

Then I asked what he had put as the cause of death.

'Covid-19,' he replied.

When I challenged this, he explained that it was because there had been deaths from Covid on the dementia floor . . . so they consider it reasonable to assume . . .

'But Doctor,' I protested, 'an assumption isn't a diagnosis.'

He sounded sympathetic but uncomfortable, as he acknowledged my point and assured me that all Dad's underlying health conditions were also recorded. But as the secondary cause of death.

When I registered Dad's death by telephone (as you have to these days), the registrar told me there had been very many other cases like ours where 'the deceased' had not tested positive for Covid, yet it was recorded as the cause of death.

They agreed that, yes, it must distort the national figures — 'and yet the strangest thing is that every winter we record countless deaths from flu, and this winter there have been none. Not one!'

So, I asked, did the registrar wonder if deaths from flu were being misdiagnosed and lumped together with Covid deaths? The answer was a puzzled 'Yes'.

The funeral director said the same thing, saying they had lost count of the number of families upset by the same issue.

How could we begin to understand the frightening new Covid-19 if, from the beginning, nobody was bothering too much about accuracy? How many of the 30,851 (as of January 15) care home resident deaths with Covid-19 on the certificate (32.4 per cent of all deaths so far) were based on an assumption, like that of my father? And what has that done to our national psyche?

The ONS statistics reflect deaths 'involving' Covid or 'due to' Covid — essentially, any death where Covid-19 was mentioned on the death certificate — but they do not take into account whether the deceased had ever tested positive for the virus.

My father will now become one of these ONS statistics, even though I don't believe that he ever had Covid-19.

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We can join in a national chorus of shock and horror at reaching the 120,000 death toll — which is surely certain to have been totally skewed all along. But what is worse than the sad deaths in care homes of people like Dad, who would have died anyway because it was their time? I'll tell you.

During the lockdown last spring, according to the British Medical Journal, there was a 1,493 per cent increase in cases of children taken to Great Ormond Street Hospital with abusive head injuries. Sheltered folk won't know that some children are safer at school than at home.

Perhaps the most shocking thing about all this is that families have been kept apart — and obeyed the most irrational, changing rules at the whim of government — because they believed in the statistics. They succumbed to fear.

Dad (God rest his soul) would be angry. And so am I.

Read Bel's full article here.