Dr Waqar Rashid Dr Waqar Rashid

The scandal of excess deaths at home

Ambulances outside King's College Hospital, London (Photo: iStock)

How does one measure health in the midst of the extraordinary times we live in? The usual markers: visits to doctors, waiting lists, and number of people in hospital, have all changed beyond recognition and there is mounting concern that amidst the justifiable concern over coronavirus, other diseases are being forgotten. Trying to determine what exactly is going on is not easy but thanks to the Centre of Evidence Based Medicine (CEBM) at Oxford University and its publishing of an estimate of non-Covid-19 related death figures over the last five weeks, we have been given a dramatic insight into an unseen and largely unreported rise in deaths occurring at home which appear to now outnumber fatalities due to the virus itself.

There has always been some scepticism about the accuracy of the death toll related to coronavirus, both in this country and across the world. This has been written about previously in The Spectator. Often a positive PCR test for Covid-19 is sufficient to attribute a death to the disease, regardless of other possible causes or health issues. It has also been acceptable to attribute a death to the virus if the person’s symptoms matched, but no diagnostic test has taken place. It opened up the whole – and unanswerable – issue of how many people died with Covid or due to the virus.

I personally regret that currently the narrative around health and illness is simply about life or death. Until recently, every evening on broadcast television news we were solemnly informed of the daily death toll of Covid-19 and given a running total. The NHS website still publishes a daily total and the number is used by many as a marker of ‘success’ in managing this pandemic. Almost simultaneously over recent months I have heard people offer reasons why the number was being under-reported or conversely overestimated for differing reasons.

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Dr Waqar Rashid
Written by
Dr Waqar Rashid
Dr Waqar Rashid is a consultant neurologist at St George's University Foundation Hospital NHS Trust, London. This article is a personal view and does not necessarily represent the views of the Trust. He tweets at @DrWaqarRashid1

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