https://www.reddit.com/r/LockdownSkepticism/comments/1iz2ca0/counting_the_dead_how_the_uk_failed_at_the/
Counting the dead
How the UK failed at the logistics of death when it mattered most
Laura Dodsworth
Feb 26, 2025
The Day of Reflection But Not on Everything
On 9th March 2025, the government wants us to reflectbut only on
approved narratives. Missing from their script are the long-term
consequences of lockdowns, mandates, economic devastation, and social >division.
In the lead-up to this carefully curated day, Ill be publishing a
series of articles which offer alternative reflections. Today, an
article originally published in The Critic magazine on 11th September 2020.
We humans keep dying. We always have. We always will. In 2019,
approximately 57,000,000 people died globally, and 600,000 people in the
UK, which equates to 1,600 people per day. As the only real certainty of
life is that we are all going to die, we should be better at the death >business by now.
Its important to count the dead. We count the big numbers and compare
them annually excess deaths are a barometer that something is
happening. But we also need to know and record how people die for
public health management: planning NHS resources in the future, to
inform government policy, for legal and jurisprudence reasons, and to
provide certainty and alleviate the concerns and grief of the bereaveds >family.
While death and disease have dominated the headlines in the UK for most
of 2020, were less good at considering our own demise. Perhaps the
potent blend of death tolls in the headlines and our intrinsic fear of
death blunted the nations ability to scrutinise exactly what these
totals actually mean.
The UKs emergency legislation in response to Covid-19 has radically
changed how deaths are registered. If the Imperial modelling that
predicted 500,000 deaths came to pass, it would be essential to fast
track the registering and disposal of bodies. The UK did not want an
Italy or Ecuador situation with bodies piling up. But this came at a
cost: at a time when it is crucial to understand why people are dying,
we have less clarity due to the changes in registration and recording,
and due to lack of preparedness there are other social costs to count.
Unprecedented has been horribly over-used this year and simply does
not stack up against other bad flu years but it should not equal >unplanned. Ministers claimed not to have read the 2016 Exercise Cygnus >pandemic planning report. Before Cygnus there was 2007s Exercise Winter >Willow, as well detailed debriefs into SARS, MERS, H1N1 and even Ebola.
Plans should have been robust and flexible, but the NHS and Public
Health England were ill-prepared in terms of surge capacity and PPE stocks.
Unprecedented is no excuse when pandemics are the basic bread and
butter of disaster planning. Lucy Easthope is a disaster planner with a >special interest in pre-emptive pandemic and recovery planning. She has >advised the government on Covid-19, as well as Grenfell, the Salisbury >Novichok poisoning and the Manchester bombing. She is the visible >representation of the depth and detail of the UKs disaster preparation
and puts lie to the so-called lack of planning. She said, The media and
the government have sold the idea that no one could have expected this,
but a pandemic is the most likely national risk, and very well prepared
for in the Home Office and the Cabinet.
Easthope is involved in planning for excess death and told me the UK is
ready to store thousands of bodies: For every Covid-19 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, suicide.
So, should we have locked down? She is cautious, saying, 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.
I spoke to a coroner (who does not wish to be named) who confirmed that
the UK quickly increased mortuary capacity. They think the lockdown and >changes to death registrations were necessary when knowledge was scant
and 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.
A scientific advisor deeply embedded in Whitehall also spoke to me >anonymously. They told me they warned 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 tank the economy. We
have never trained for a lockdown like this. You dont do it for a >coronavirus. Ive been through all my papers. Its 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 dont really know how
many people have died of Covid-19. 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. And in a time of social distancing, what does
seeing actually mean? It might be a zoom appointment or telephone
call. Remote verification of the body is even possible by someone who is
not a medical professional although they should be independent of family >members.
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 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.
The anonymous scientific advisor is frank about the result: We have no
idea how many people died because of this disease. Easthope confirmed
that we have a crisis in death recording.
15,460 deaths have occurred in care homes in England and Wales, which is
over a third of the total Covid-19 deaths, and approximately another
5,000 care home residents have died with Covid-19 after being
transferred to hospital. Another 746in hospices. However, there is
growing uncertainty about some care home deaths.
I spoke to a care home worker in the north of England about this
problem. They have had cases where Covid-19 has been inaccurately put on
the death certificate as the cause of death or an underlying cause of
death. One resident, well into her 80s, tested positive for coronavirus
at the end of March, when she had mild symptoms. She recovered but went
on to die in August. A covering doctor who had never met the resident or
seen the body, insisted that Covid-19 must have been a cause of death.
The care home worker says, She actually died of old age, quite
peacefully and contentedly. Old age isnt supposed to be used on death >certificates, but sometimes its what it is. How many times has this >happened in care homes across the country?
There are a number of dangers. The Covid-19 death total is probably
inflated as it has been liberally applied on death certificates. But a >positive test doesnt mean Covid-19 was necessarily a contributing cause
of death. As all of my interviewees said, we have no idea how often this
has happened, and now we never will.
Lockdown itself has caused a horrifying number of excess deaths, just as >Easthope warned. By the end of July, one report attributed 21,000 of the >excess deaths to lockdown, as a result of delays to treatment. There is
an epidemic of people needlessly dying at home because they are
reluctant, or unable, to seek medical help.
Frontline mental health professionals are concerned about the impact of >lockdown. One ONS study showed that the number of people experiencing
some sort of depression increased from one in ten to one in five during >lockdown. Suicide is the biggest killer of young people in the UK. Some >children remain on lengthy waiting lists for mental health treatment.
Ged Flynn, CEO of suicide charity Papyrus says, This is scandalous.
Saving young lives is no longer a national priority and we must change
that. Nine out of ten calls to Papyrus during lockdown reflected the
impact of Covid-19 and lockdown, with many concerned about a loss of
income, reduction in service provision, domestic violence and abuse, and
the potential to become infected with Covid-19. Ged warns of the
longer-term problem of emotional distress for young people as the
impact of lockdown continues and mental health services are stretched.
We have never recorded and announced the deaths of one disease with such >dedication. Was this in the spirit of public information or was there an >intention to use the metrics designed to create fear? At the outset the >British public was informed how many people had died every day. As the >numbers started decreasing, the focus moved to the R number the rate
of transmission, seemingly generated by a mysterious alchemy and then
to new cases, where we are now. Increasing cases are, of course, also a >result of increased testing. Crucially, this means the number of cases
can be as large or as small as public policy determines, rather than >indicative of the spread or danger of the virus.
Its just been announced that positive results will be repeatedly
tested, hopefully eliminating some false positives. Its interesting
that this coincides with the lockdown screws tightening, as gatherings
are reduced from 30 to six, and the first curfew since the Second World
War is threatened. Ministers will be able to proclaim the success of
these restrictions when cases can be influenced depending on
sensitivity and volume of testing. We cannot leave the counting to them.
Public Health England death totals had to be revised down after their >counting fiasco was exposed by Carl Heneghan. If you tested positive for >Covid-19, your death at any time would have been counted as a Covid-19
death. Professor John Newton, Director of Health Improvement at Public
Health England, said, The way we count deaths in people with Covid-19
in England was originally chosen to avoid underestimating deaths caused
by the virus in the early stages of the pandemic. Did the statistics
become politicised?
Death endures as a metric. Even if the death tolls are revised down, as
with PHEs count, the numbers endure, said Easthope. In the UK and the
US, death is the metric that we have to come to measure catastrophe by.
The anonymous scientific advisor wonders if the choice of metrics
reported and the way we count deaths might be part of a plan to increase >fear. After all, we know that SAGE recommended that peoples sense of >personal threat needed to be increased to encourage compliance with
rules. Even now we have passed the peak of the pandemic, government
messaging still centres on fear.
Easthope is worried that weve done something incredibly traumatising
to the families that is potentially bigger than the bereavement itself.
In any disaster you should still allow people to see the dead. It is a
gross inhumanity of bad planning that people couldnt visit the sick,
view the deceaseds bodies, or attend funerals. Had we had a more
liberal PPE stockpile we could have done this. PPE is about accessing
your loved ones and dead ones, it is not just about medical professionals.
Good planning was cast aside. We were not equipped to process the Covid
dead, and well never be able to properly count them. In decades to
come, when the inevitable reports and studies are published they will be >littered with asterisks and freighted with footnotes. Or worse, taken >dangerously at face value.
Beyond counting the dead, how do we count the cost to ourselves? Dying
alone in a hospice, last rites delivered in full PPE, no family beside
the bed. People unable to visit elderly relatives in care homes for
months. Funerals limited to ten people. The young calling suicide
helplines, bewildered and traumatised. The uncertainty over cause of
deaths, the lack of closure. For this, we need the ultimate inquest and
then the birth of better ways to count the dead.
Michael Ejercito wrote:
https://www.reddit.com/r/LockdownSkepticism/comments/1iz2ca0/counting_the_dead_how_the_uk_failed_at_the/
Counting the dead
How the UK failed at the logistics of death when it mattered most
Laura Dodsworth
Feb 26, 2025
The Day of Reflection – But Not on Everything
On 9th March 2025, the government wants us to reflect—but only on
approved narratives. Missing from their script are the long-term
consequences of lockdowns, mandates, economic devastation, and social
division.
In the lead-up to this carefully curated day, I’ll be publishing a
series of articles which offer alternative reflections. Today, an
article originally published in The Critic magazine on 11th September 2020. >>
We humans keep dying. We always have. We always will. In 2019,
approximately 57,000,000 people died globally, and 600,000 people in the
UK, which equates to 1,600 people per day. As the only real certainty of
life is that we are all going to die, we should be better at the death
business by now.
It’s important to count the dead. We count the big numbers and compare
them annually – excess deaths are a barometer that “something is
happening”. But we also need to know and record how people die for
public health management: planning NHS resources in the future, to
inform government policy, for legal and jurisprudence reasons, and to
provide certainty and alleviate the concerns and grief of the bereaved’s >> family.
While death and disease have dominated the headlines in the UK for most
of 2020, we’re less good at considering our own demise. Perhaps the
potent blend of death tolls in the headlines and our intrinsic fear of
death blunted the nation’s ability to scrutinise exactly what these
totals actually mean.
The UK’s emergency legislation in response to Covid-19 has radically
changed how deaths are registered. If the Imperial modelling that
predicted 500,000 deaths came to pass, it would be essential to fast
track the registering and disposal of bodies. The UK did not want an
Italy or Ecuador situation with bodies piling up. But this came at a
cost: at a time when it is crucial to understand why people are dying,
we have less clarity due to the changes in registration and recording,
and due to lack of preparedness there are other social costs to count.
“Unprecedented” has been horribly over-used this year – and simply does
not stack up against other bad flu years – but it should not equal
“unplanned”. Ministers claimed not to have read the 2016 Exercise Cygnus >> pandemic planning report. Before Cygnus there was 2007’s Exercise Winter >> Willow, as well detailed debriefs into SARS, MERS, H1N1 and even Ebola.
Plans should have been robust and flexible, but the NHS and Public
Health England were ill-prepared in terms of surge capacity and PPE stocks. >>
“Unprecedented” is no excuse when pandemics are the basic bread and
butter of disaster planning. Lucy Easthope is a disaster planner with a
special interest in pre-emptive pandemic and recovery planning. She has
advised the government on Covid-19, as well as Grenfell, the Salisbury
Novichok poisoning and the Manchester bombing. She is the visible
representation of the depth and detail of the UK’s disaster preparation
and puts lie to the so-called lack of planning. She said, “The media and >> the government have sold the idea that no one could have expected this,
but a pandemic is the most likely national risk, and very well prepared
for in the Home Office and the Cabinet.”
Easthope is involved in planning for excess death and told me the UK is
ready to store thousands of bodies: “For every Covid-19 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, suicide.”
So, should we have locked down? She is cautious, saying, “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.”
I spoke to a coroner (who does not wish to be named) who confirmed that
the UK quickly increased mortuary capacity. They think the lockdown and
changes to death registrations were necessary when knowledge was scant
and 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.”
A scientific advisor deeply embedded in Whitehall also spoke to me
anonymously. They told me they warned 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 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-19. 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. And in a time of social distancing, what does
“seeing” actually mean? It might be a zoom appointment or telephone
call. Remote verification of the body is even possible by someone who is
not a medical professional although they should be independent of family
members.
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 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.
The anonymous scientific advisor is frank about the result: “We have no
idea how many people died because of this disease.” Easthope confirmed
that “we have a crisis in death recording.”
15,460 deaths have occurred in care homes in England and Wales, which is
over a third of the total Covid-19 deaths, and approximately another
5,000 care home residents have died with Covid-19 after being
transferred to hospital. Another 746in hospices. However, there is
growing uncertainty about some care home deaths.
I spoke to a care home worker in the north of England about this
problem. They have had cases where Covid-19 has been inaccurately put on
the death certificate as the cause of death or an underlying cause of
death. One resident, well into her 80s, tested positive for coronavirus
at the end of March, when she had mild symptoms. She recovered but went
on to die in August. A covering doctor who had never met the resident or
seen the body, insisted that Covid-19 must have been a cause of death.
The care home worker says, “She actually died of old age, quite
peacefully and contentedly. Old age isn’t supposed to be used on death
certificates, but sometimes it’s what it is.” How many times has this
happened in care homes across the country?
There are a number of dangers. The Covid-19 death total is probably
inflated as it has been liberally applied on death certificates. But a
positive test doesn’t mean Covid-19 was necessarily a contributing cause >> of death. As all of my interviewees said, we have no idea how often this
has happened, and now we never will.
Lockdown itself has caused a horrifying number of excess deaths, just as
Easthope warned. By the end of July, one report attributed 21,000 of the
excess deaths to lockdown, as a result of delays to treatment. There is
an “epidemic” of people needlessly dying at home because they are
reluctant, or unable, to seek medical help.
Frontline mental health professionals are concerned about the impact of
lockdown. One ONS study showed that the number of people experiencing
some sort of depression increased from one in ten to one in five during
lockdown. Suicide is the biggest killer of young people in the UK. Some
children remain on lengthy waiting lists for mental health treatment.
Ged Flynn, CEO of suicide charity Papyrus says, “This is scandalous.
Saving young lives is no longer a national priority and we must change
that.” Nine out of ten calls to Papyrus during lockdown reflected the
impact of Covid-19 and lockdown, with many concerned about a loss of
income, reduction in service provision, domestic violence and abuse, and
the potential to become infected with Covid-19. Ged warns of the
“longer-term problem of emotional distress” for young people as the
impact of lockdown continues and mental health services are stretched.
We have never recorded and announced the deaths of one disease with such
dedication. Was this in the spirit of public information or was there an
intention to use the metrics designed to create fear? At the outset the
British public was informed how many people had died every day. As the
numbers started decreasing, the focus moved to the “R” number – the rate
of transmission, seemingly generated by a mysterious alchemy – and then
to new cases, where we are now. Increasing cases are, of course, also a
result of increased testing. Crucially, this means the number of cases
can be as large or as small as public policy determines, rather than
indicative of the spread or danger of the virus.
It’s just been announced that positive results will be repeatedly
tested, hopefully eliminating some false positives. It’s interesting
that this coincides with the lockdown screws tightening, as gatherings
are reduced from 30 to six, and the first curfew since the Second World
War is threatened. Ministers will be able to proclaim the success of
these restrictions when “cases” can be influenced depending on
sensitivity and volume of testing. We cannot leave the counting to them.
Public Health England death totals had to be revised down after their
counting fiasco was exposed by Carl Heneghan. If you tested positive for
Covid-19, your death at any time would have been counted as a Covid-19
death. Professor John Newton, Director of Health Improvement at Public
Health England, said, “The way we count deaths in people with Covid-19
in England was originally chosen to avoid underestimating deaths caused
by the virus in the early stages of the pandemic.” Did the statistics
become politicised?
“Death endures as a metric. Even if the death tolls are revised down, as >> with PHE’s count, the numbers endure,” said Easthope. “In the UK and the
US, death is the metric that we have to come to measure catastrophe by.” >>
The anonymous scientific advisor wonders if the choice of metrics
reported and the way we count deaths might be part of a plan to increase
fear. After all, we know that SAGE recommended that people’s sense of
personal threat needed to be increased to encourage compliance with
rules. Even now we have passed the peak of the pandemic, government
messaging still centres on fear.
Easthope is worried that “we’ve done something incredibly traumatising >> to the families that is potentially bigger than the bereavement itself.
In any disaster you should still allow people to see the dead. It is a
gross inhumanity of bad planning that people couldn’t visit the sick,
view the deceased’s bodies, or attend funerals. Had we had a more
liberal PPE stockpile we could have done this. PPE is about accessing
your loved ones and dead ones, it is not just about medical professionals.”
Good planning was cast aside. We were not equipped to process the Covid
dead, and we’ll never be able to properly count them. In decades to
come, when the inevitable reports and studies are published they will be
littered with asterisks and freighted with footnotes. Or worse, taken
dangerously at face value.
Beyond counting the dead, how do we count the cost to ourselves? Dying
alone in a hospice, last rites delivered in full PPE, no family beside
the bed. People unable to visit elderly relatives in care homes for
months. Funerals limited to ten people. The young calling suicide
helplines, bewildered and traumatised. The uncertainty over cause of
deaths, the lack of closure. For this, we need the ultimate inquest and
then the birth of better ways to count the dead.
In the interim, we are 100% prepared/protected in the "full armor of
GOD" (Ephesians 6:11) which we put on as soon as we use Apostle Paul's
secret (Philippians 4:12). Though masking is less protective, it helps
us avoid the appearance of doing the evil of spreading airborne
pathogens while there are people getting sick because of not being
100% protected. It is written that we're to "abstain from **all**
appearance of doing evil" (1 Thessalonians 5:22 w/**emphasis**).
Meanwhile, the only *perfect* (Matt 5:47-8 ) way to eradicate the
COVID-19 virus, thereby saving lives, in the UK & elsewhere is by
rapidly (i.e. use the "Rapid COVID-19 Test" ) finding out at any given moment, including even while on-line, who among us are unwittingly
contagious (i.e pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic) in order to
"convince it forward" (John 15:12) for them to call their doctor and self-quarantine per their doctor in hopes of stopping this pandemic.
Thus, we're hoping for the best while preparing for the worse-case
scenario of the Alpha lineage mutations and others like the Omicron,
Gamma, Beta, Epsilon, Iota, Lambda, Mu & Delta lineage mutations
combining via slip-RNA-replication to form hybrids like "Deltamicron"
that may render current COVID vaccines/monoclonals/medicines/pills no
longer effective.
Indeed, I am wonderfully hungry ( https://groups.google.com/g/sci.med.cardiology/c/6ZoE95d-VKc/m/14vVZoyOBgAJ
) and hope you, Michael, also have a healthy appetite too.
So how are you ?
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