Tag Archives: Carl Heneghan

Governments inflated number of COVID-19 deaths & hospitalizations

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve seen anecdotal accounts of a non-COVID death being attributed to COVID.

Now, a few governments are admitting that they have “inflated” (i.e., lied about) the numbers of both COVID deaths and COVID hospitalizations.

Below are two examples.

(1) California

Chris Enloe reports for The Blaze that Alameda County in the San Francisco Bay Area, had revised its COVID-19 data methodology to only include people who directly died from COVID-19, resulting in a massive 25% decrease in its reported COVID-19 deaths from 1,634 to 1,223 — a decrease of 411.

Neetu Balram, a spokesperson for the Alameda County Public Health Department, said the 411 people removed from the county’s COVID-19 death toll died from causes “clearly not caused by COVID.”

Previously, Alameda County officials had included in their death toll any resident who died while infected the virus — not just those individuals who died directly from COVID-19.

(2) United Kingdom

The (UK) Telegraph reports, July 29, 2021, that National Health Service (NHS) official data reveal that as many as “One in four patients classed as a Covid hospitalisation is being treated for other reasons . . . prompting claims that the public has been misled.” Many patients categorized as Covid hospitalizations had another primary cause of admission. “The data shows that of 5,021 patients this week classed as hospitalised by Covid, 1,166 were admitted for other reasons.”

In some areas, almost one in three COVID hospitalizations was actually admitted for other reasons. 

Tory MPs accused the Government of making “flawed decisions based on misleading data”, while leading scientists questioned why the true picture was only now beginning to emerge.

Prof. Carl Heneghan, the director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford, said: “This data is incredibly important, and this is information we should have had a very long time ago. We have been crying out for it for nearly 18 months. The Government might have made very different decisions about restrictions if it had access to data which actually measured the situation accurately.

Last summer, Public Health England (PHE) was forced to make changes to the way it reported death figures after its methods were found to inflate total numbers by counting as a virus fatality anyone who tested positive for Covid and later died. 

~E