Hospital deaths in Scotland went down, not up, during the first year of the Covid-19 hoax

This is a report that I prepared in December 2020 for submission to the British Medical Journal that has relevance to the Scottish Covid Inquiry

In December 2020 I drafted an editorial for the British Medical Journal that never saw the light of day. The article, a brief 790 words, has been in a folder on my desktop until today when, after having recently been reminded about the Scottish Covid Inquiry, I thought to dig it out and share it with you.

To give you an idea what the paper is about, here are the British Medical Journal’s standard questions on submission and my answers to the questions in December 2020:

Q. Title or Topic

A: ‘Hospital deaths in Scotland have gone down, not up, during the COVID-19 pandemic’.

Q: Why is this topic important now?

A: Excess death during the COVID-19 pandemic is very topical and what most people want to know, as this is an important factor determining government policy. However, the reporting of these data by the UK government has been very limited.

Q. Why is this (topic) relevant to a general medical audience?  *

A: Health professionals and the public are under the impression that hospital deaths in the UK have increased during the pandemic.

Q:. Please list 1-3 take home messages for readers (one sentence on each take home message)

A: 1.  Hospital deaths in Scotland were down overall during the COVID-19 period between week 12 and week 51 of 2020, and virtually all excess deaths occurred at home or in care homes. 

2. More than 1000 deaths from respiratory disease may have been mistakenly attributed to COVID-19. 

3. A substantial number of excess deaths may have occurred due to the secondary effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

(Bear in mind that this was written in 2020 for the British Medical Journal. I generally use inverted commas when referring to the COVID “pandemic”, because it wasn’t one.)

Q: What does your proposed article add to previous BMJ coverage of this topic? *

A: To my knowledge, this topic has not been covered by the BMJ before. However, it adds to the recent editorial by Kamran Abbasi about the procurement of suboptimal PCR tests, which I posit may be the reason for the misclassification of a large number of non-COVID-19 deaths in Scotland as COVID-19 deaths.

Publishing for the first time, here is the brief report I prepared in December 2020 for the BMJ to illuminate the Scottish excess deaths situation:

(Dec 2020) Hospital deaths in Scotland have gone down, not up, during the COVID-19 pandemic

The National Records of Scotland (NRS) website has reported that “as at 20 December 2020, 6,298 deaths have been registered in Scotland where the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) was mentioned on the death certificate”.¹ Also published on the website on the 23^rd December 2020, Pete Whitehouse, Director of Statistical Services at the NRS, is quoted saying, with reference to week 51: “The majority of [COVID-19] deaths occurred in hospitals, representing 124 deaths. 71 [COVID-19] deaths occurred in care homes, and 8 [COVID-19] occurred at home or in a non-institutional setting.”¹ As the denominators of these reported statistics were unclear, I decided to examine the NRS excess deaths data to gain a better understanding of the COVID-19 situation in Scotland.

The NRS stratifies its data on excess deaths according to the location of the registered deaths, namely at home, in care homes, in hospitals and in ‘other institutions’, such as prisons, clinics, and schools. For the purposes of calculating excess deaths, it records weekly deaths from the 16^th of March 2020 (week 12) for the following six classes of deaths: cancer, dementia/Alzheimer’s disease, circulatory disease (including heart disease and stroke), respiratory disease, COVID-19, and ‘other’ and compares these figures with the 5-year average for that week. At the time of writing, these weekly data on excess deaths were available for the period up to the 14^th of December 2020 (week 51).² Data presented in Table 1 are derived directly from the NRS spreadsheet for this 39-week period,² accompanied by simple percentage calculations.

The NRS spreadsheet entitled “covid-deaths-data-week-51” as downloaded from the NRS website on the 27^th December 2020 indicates that, for the past five years, deaths in Scotland over this 39-week period averaged 42,428.² Compared with this 5-year average, 6,406 excess deaths occurred over the same period in 2020, representing an increase in the overall number of deaths of 15.1% (Table 1). COVID-19 was attributed to 5,717 of the 2020 excess deaths (89.2%). Overall, however, hospital deaths were down by 3% compared with the 5-year average, whilst deaths at home and in care homes were up by 40.8% and 23.6%, respectively. The vast majority of excess deaths (4,710 deaths; 73.5%) occurred at home, whilst virtually all other excess deaths (2,311 deaths; 36.1%) occurred in care homes.

Surprisingly, the NRS data also show that deaths from non-COVID-19 respiratory disease in Scotland were down by 22.3% overall during the 39-week COVID-19 period. This suggests that excess deaths due to COVID-19 may have been artificially inflated by deaths that would usually have occurred due to influenza, pneumonia and other respiratory illnesses. Notably, it appears that hospital deaths in Scotland from (non-COVID) respiratory disease decreased by a staggering 33.8% during the COVID-19 pandemic. Similarly, hospital deaths from cancer (decreased by 22.4%), dementia (decreased by 25.9%), and circulatory disease (heart disease and stroke) (decreased by 14.2%) were all substantially reduced compared with the 5-year Scottish average for Scotland. Could these consistent and substantial decreases across the usual causes of hospital deaths be due to false positive PCR tests? Much has been published about false negative PCR tests but little appears to have been published about false positives.³ More research on the accuracy of diagnostic tests for COVID-19 is clearly needed to ensure that positive tests can be trusted. This is particularly important in light of a recent BMJ editorial highlighting that the UK government has procured suboptimal PCR tests.⁴

For deaths occurring at home, which comprised the majority of excess deaths, cancer deaths increased by 47.0%, dementia deaths increased by 80.5% and home deaths from other conditions increased by 39.3% (Table 1).  These data on home deaths suggest that many people in Scotland have not been able to access essential medical care during the pandemic. The latter is also suggested by the increase in excess deaths due to dementia, circulatory disease and ‘other’ conditions by 1769 deaths overall since the start of the COVID-19 monitoring period.

By contrast, deaths occurring in care homes due to cancer and non-COVID-19 respiratory disease were down by 16.9% and 17.8%, respectively. As with the hospital data, these care home data suggests that a significant proportion of the excess care home deaths in Scotland may have been incorrectly attributed to COVID-19.

In summary, non-COVID deaths in Scotland increased during the COVID-19 period compared with the 5-year Scottish average. Hospital deaths were down overall, and virtually all excess deaths occurred at home or in care homes. More than 1000 deaths from respiratory disease may have been mistakenly attributed to COVID-19. A substantial number of excess deaths may have occurred due to the secondary effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, as a result of disruption in health care provision to people with other serious and commonly occurring acute medical conditions, and disruption to mental health.⁵

Conflicts of interest

None

Funding

None

References

1. National Records of Scotland. 2020 https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/print/3493 (accessed 27/12/2020)

2. National Records of Scotland. 2020 https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/statistics-and-data/statistics/statistics-by-theme/vital-events/general-publications/weekly-and-monthly-data-on-births-and-deaths/deaths-involving-coronavirus-covid-19-in-scotland (accessed 27/12/2020)

3. Esteve C, Catherine FX, Chavanet P, Blot M, Piroth L. How should a positive PCR test result for COVID-19 in an asymptomatic individual be interpreted and managed?. Med Mal Infect. 2020;50(8):633-638. doi:10.1016/j.medmal.2020.09.014

4. Abbasi K. Covid-19: politicisation, “corruption,” and suppression of science. BMJ 2020; 371:m4425.

5. Ioannidis JPA. Global perspective of COVID‐19 epidemiology for a full‐cycle pandemic. Eur J Clin Invest. 2020 Dec;50(12):e13423. doi: 10.1111/eci.13423

I hope that this article may be useful in some way to Scottish efforts to shed light on the truth of what happened in Scotland during the COVID scam.

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