[continued from previous message]

>> 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 p
ofessionals.”
>>
>> 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

[continued in next message]

--- SoupGate-DOS v1.05
 * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)