OF THE
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But there's another, potentially even more serious problem: the way that deaths are recorded. If someone dies of a respiratory infection in the UK, the specific cause of the infection is not usually recorded, unless the illness is a rare 'notifiable disease'.
So the vast majority of respiratory deaths in the UK are recorded as bronchopneumonia, pneumonia, old age or a similar designation. We don't really test for flu, or other seasonal infections. If the patient has, say, cancer, motor neurone disease or another serious disease, this will be recorded as the cause of death, even if the final illness was a respiratory infection. This means UK certifications normally under-record deaths due to respiratory infections.
Now look at what has happened since the emergence of Covid-19. The list of notifiable diseases has been updated. This list — as well as containing smallpox (which has been extinct for many years) and conditions such as anthrax, brucellosis, plague and rabies (which most UK doctors will never see in their entire careers) — has now been amended to include Covid-19. But not flu. That means every positive test for Covid-19 must be notified, in a way that it just would not be for flu or most other infections.
- How deadly is the coronavirus? It's still far from clear, The Specator, 28th March 2020

"The only means to fight the plague is honesty." Albert Camus, The Plague (1947)Overview
"increase measures to control spread of the virus, prepare and increase capacity of the health system to cope, ensure physical distancing and communicate the why and how of all measures to the population."Donald Trump also felt the need to give his two cents as well:
"Sweden did that, the herd, they call it the herd. Sweden's suffering very, very badly."But is Sweden really suffering very, very badly in comparison to other countries that have imposed severe restrictions? Is it really imperative that they change course and fall in line with what most other countries have done? Or do these calls proceed from a different motive entirely: a fear that Sweden's comparatively measured approach of dealing with Covid-19 without introducing the most draconian civil restrictions ever seen and without crashing its economy might actually work and in so doing show the response of other countries to have been wildly disproportionate?
Comment: Indeed, and we would add to our guest author's conclusion that evidence is emerging from every country that the official 'COVID-19 death figures' include many deaths that had nothing whatsoever to do with COVID-19. And they include - though the distinction is never made by the media - deaths in which the person tested positive for COVID-19, BUT who would not ordinarily have been certified as having died from such BECAUSE HE/SHE HAD MULTIPLE CO-MORBIDITIES!
All of which serves to plummet the case-to-fatality death rate so low as to render COVID-19 (relatively) benign to the human species, and further underscore the utterly mad premise that a literal shutting down of civilization was necessary to 'stop this plague'.