According to a recent article published by The World Economic Forum website, studies show that the COVID-19 death rate could in fact prove to be vastly overestimated. The article was written by Nina Schwalbe who’s a member for the Council on Foreign Relations and principal visiting fellow at the United Nations University, International Institute for Global Health. In the article she highlights a lack of adequate testing which means many of those who have been infected with the coronavirus will not appear in the official statistics. This of course suggests that many estimates for its mortality rate are much too high she says, as she argues for a better system of sharing and reporting data.

We also have the Oxford study being conducted. Seemingly the only mainstream media outlet to be covering this in any detail is the Financial Times. They reported that according to the Oxford study, the new coronavirus may have already affected half of the UK population – far more than scientists previously estimated. And if the results are confirmed, this will imply that 1 in 1000 of those infected with covid-19 become sick enough to require hospital treatment. That’s according to Dr Sunetra Gupta, who is a professor of theoretical epidemiology and has constructed an epidemiological model for the coronavirus and is leading the study. Their point is that the vast majority develop very mild symptoms or none at all. Their research suggests that covid-19 reached the UK around mid-January at the latest and perhaps as early as December 2019. It looks to have spread invisibly for a month or more before the first transmissions within the UK were officially recorded at the end of February, and that the epidemic started to grow after that. 

In the notes section of website Office for National Statistics, they state that “A death can be registered with both covid-19 and influenza or pneumonia mentioned on the death certificate, therefore a death may be counted in both categories.”

Is this something that happens normally? Or is it special to covid-19? 
According to the Office for National Statistics, “It is not something that would have always been the case and is only for covid-19 reporting.”

Therefore, what the Office for National Statistics is actually doing is, looking at a death certificate and saying that if the word covid-19 is on there and no matter what else is recorded, they are allocating it as a covid-19 death. If people from the Council on Foreign Relations are concerned that the UK are not testing properly and affecting the mortality rate, surely this has got to be skewing the death figures as well and raising many questions, such as what does the death certificate actually say and what is it based on? Is it presumed covid-19 or is it based on testing? Is it simply because the person had flu-like symptoms perhaps amongst many other more serious medical ailments when they died? And if it was based on testing – how reliable was the test? What were they testing for exactly? And what is the false-positive rate? None of which seems to be clear at all. 

And it’s not just the UK. If we look at the US, the CDC are instructing their hospitals to list COVID as the cause of death, even if it is just an assumption or only contributed to the death. Meaning the data that they do have could end up being terminally skewed also. Issued on March, 24th, CDC.org guidance tells hospitals to: list covid-19 as a cause of death regardless of whether or not there is actually testing to confirm that’s the case, instead – even if the coronavirus was just a contributing factor or if it’s assumed it caused or contributed to the death it can be listed as the primary cause.