'A sudden and significant spike' in deaths in care homes in UK 3/20

[alisonfletch]

John Dee is the former head of clinical audit at a busy NHS teaching hospital with specialism in assessment of clinical outcomes. He served on a regional clinical reference committee in addition to supporting directors of my NHS Foundation & Primary Care Trusts.
After looking at his figures, Steve Kirsch asked "Ok so what caused this? Fraud?"
Reply
John Dee
"A GP colleague talks about dangerous discharge, others talk about implementation of end-of-life care pathways for folk whose life wasn't at an end".

https://jdee.substack.com/?utm_source=s ... um=reader2

All this information is brought together in a spreadsheet called Weekly Care Home Deaths 2020.01 – 2022.21.xlsx where you also get to see the coding convention for variable names, estimation methods, corrections and calculations made. I’ve also reproduced the two graphs for you.

'Somebody asked in the comments how many non-COVID excess deaths there were in the period 2020/w13 – 2020/w21. You can go find the total yourself in the spreadsheet though I’ll spoil the movie and report the incredible sum of 11,253. If we take the 9-week period 2020/w1 – 2020/w9 we arrive at a total of 4,060 excess non-COVID deaths, so the rate rocketed by a factor of 2.77 (277% in old money).

We may expect care homes to have been under tremendous pressure at this time, with neglect and errors creeping in, but this would have generated a steady ramping of excess death as residents slowly suffered; it would not have generated a sudden and significant spike. Some folk are arguing that misdiagnosed COVID death during the early stages of the pandemic may be to blame and I am sure this forms part of the picture, but again this would not explain a sudden and significant surge in (synchronised) death. In my NHS experience blips like this are caused by changes in policy and we must consider the unpalatable prospect of iatrogenic death.

In the final analysis none of us should be guessing as to what may or may not have caused this extraordinary care home spike. There should be thorough and independent investigation, and there should ideally be a public enquiry. In my former surgical unit every single death was discussed by a multi-disciplinary team in detail every month; we were not satisfied until we agreed all that could have been done was done. Surely our elderly in care deserve no less'.