Top medics demand inquiry as families reveal MORE loved ones they believe were wrongly certified as virus victims.
Medical experts have demanded an inquiry into the number of fatalities that have been blamed on Covid-19.
More than 100 Daily Mail readers wrote letters after Bel Mooney revealed her father's death recorded as covid
Experts cited pressure on doctors to use Covid-19 as cause of death because it was ruled ‘notifiable disease’.
Grieving families last night said deaths had been wrongly certified as Covid-19.
Demanding an inquiry, top medical experts and MPs also insisted they were ‘certain’ that too many fatalities were being blamed on the virus.
One funeral director said it was ‘a national scandal’. The claims are part of a Daily Mail investigation that raises serious questions over the spiralling death toll.
More than 100 readers wrote heartbreaking letters following a moving article by Bel Mooney last Saturday. She revealed the death of her 99-year-old father, who suffered from dementia and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, was recorded as coronavirus.
Dozens expressed similar frustrations that the causes of death of elderly and already-unwell relatives had been wrongly attributed. Eight of the families who wrote to the Daily Mail have successfully urged doctors to change causes of death previously recorded as Covid-19.
Layla Moran, the Liberal Democrat MP who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on coronavirus, said: ‘The Government should call a public inquiry into the handling of the pandemic immediately with an interim investigation into all Covid deaths that should report as soon as possible.’
Tory MP Paul Bristow, a member of the Commons health committee, said: ‘It’s almost certain that a number of deaths have been wrongly attributed to Covid-19.
‘Not only has this skewed figures when data has been so important in deciding how we respond to the pandemic, it has caused distress and anxiety for relatives.
‘Whether we have received the most appropriate figures should definitely be considered in any future inquiry.’
After the Mail's BEL MOONEY revealed her father was wrongly certified as dying of coronavirus, an avalanche of responses show she is far from alone
Special investigation by Paul Bracchi and Arthur Martin for the Daily Mail.
There are three things you should know about the last few weeks of Jessie Wylde’s life.
The first is that she had dementia and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), a lung condition that causes severe breathing difficulties; the second is that she was a resident at Aldergrove Manor care home in Wolverhampton; and the third, that at the time Jessie, 83, was a resident at Aldergrove, at least, there were no confirmed cases of Covid.
She was transferred there at the beginning of last year from the high dependency unit at the city’s New Cross Hospital, where she was being treated for respiratory problems.
On April 26, around three months after leaving hospital, Jessie died.
Shortly before her death, a doctor at Aldergrove assessed her and confirmed that she had COPD.
More than 100 readers wrote heartbreaking letters following a moving article by Bel Mooney (right) last Saturday. She revealed the death of her 99-year-old father (pictured), who suffered from dementia and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, was recorded as coronavirus.
Yet despite being given such a diagnosis, despite the absence of an outbreak of Covid in Aldergrove and despite not testing positive for Covid herself, the cause of Jessie’s death was registered as Covid.
The revelation compounded her family’s grief.
‘I told the registrar that I would not accept this,’ her son Gary said when we spoke to him this week. ‘I said, “I will never, ever allow the cause of my mother’s death to be registered as Covid”.’
The person who made that decision was an on-call doctor.
When he found out, Mr Wylde, 59, the managing director of a windows firm, contacted Aldergrove’s regular doctor, who knew Jessie.
‘The doctor explained to me that in the absence of a test, doctors are encouraged to put down Covid on death certificates,’ he said. ‘But he agreed that my mother was suffering from COPD and severe dementia, and he also agreed to get the death certificate changed. This only happened because I challenged it.’
Jessie, who separated from her husband when her five children were grown up, was much loved. She went on to become a grandmother of nine and a great-grandmother of 16, which gave her much joy in later life.
‘I didn’t want my mother to become just another statistic,’ explained Mr Wylde. ‘The least she deserved was to have the right information included on her death certificate.’
Her certificate now says that the cause of death was chronic pulmonary disease (COPD) and dementia.
The word ‘Covid’ was removed.
The Wylde family are not alone; people nationwide, we now know, who have suffered bereavements during the pandemic have had a similar experience.
Their alarming testimonies have been forwarded to this newspaper following Bel Mooney’s moving account, in last Saturday’s Mail, of the death of her 99-year-old father in the early hours of February 9. He had passed three Covid tests but was still classed as one of Britain’s 120,000 Covid victims. When Bel questioned this, the care home doctor, she says, explained it was because there had been Covid fatalities on the same dementia floor.
More than 100 families contacted us in the aftermath of Bel’s report and, at the time of writing, letters were still coming in:
‘Dear Bel, I am writing to let you know that I had exactly the same experience when my mother sadly passed away’ . . . ‘Dear Bel, the same thing happened to my dad’ . . . ‘Dear Bel, I had the same problems when my darling wife passed away.’
Among the ‘postbag’ were eight families, including the Wyldes, who managed to get the death certificate or a doctor’s medical certificate cause of death (MCCD) — containing the information needed to register a death — changed because they refused to accept that a loved one had died from Covid and challenged the clinical diagnosis.
Others said they had not pursued such a course of action because they didn’t want to exacerbate the grieving process.
Common sense tells us that these can’t be the only examples. But why is this happening? The reasons, are — as we shall explain — as complex as the pandemic itself. Over-stretched doctors, anxious to do the right thing in an unprecedented situation where the recording of incidents of Covid is a legal requirement, would account for the most.
Also, of course, there’s human error, doctors’ questionable judgement and possibly those drawn towards the easiest and most convenient path when faced with impossible workloads.
There are three things you should know about the last few weeks of Jessie Wylde’s (pictured) life. The first is that she had dementia and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), a lung condition that causes severe breathing difficulties; the second is that she was a resident at Aldergrove Manor care home in Wolverhampton; and the third, that at the time Jessie, 83, was a resident at Aldergrove, at least, there were no confirmed cases of Covid.
But let’s make one thing absolutely clear: it is nonsense to suggest, as conspiracy theorists and virus deniers would have you believe, that doctors en masse are deliberately falsifying certificates to exaggerate the number of Covid deaths to justify behavioural and travel restrictions; in other words, that this all part of some government plot.
That said, the evidence that some deaths are being wrongly attributed to Covid, like for example, Jessie Wylde, is compelling.
So too are the accounts of families with elderly relatives who were already receiving end of life care suffering from, say, COPD, heart disease or cancer, when they contracted the virus; they had the virus, in other words, but, in the eyes of their families, they didn’t die from Covid but were still classified as Covid deaths.
In households across the country this alone has caused untold anguish, if the response to Bel Mooney’s article is anything to go by; for many families, rightly or wrongly, Covid is seen as a stigma — a ‘plague’ as Bel puts it — which has exacerbated their grief.
This is the hidden story behind the statistics; what the people who have been writing to the Mail in their droves over the past week are telling us.
It is why distinguished retired pathologist John Lee believes that he can ‘think of no time in my medical career when it has been more important to have accurate diagnosis of a disease and an understanding of precisely why patients have died of it.’
Bel Mooney's father Edward was wrongly certified as having died from coronavirus.
There is no accepted international standard of how you measure Covid deaths; trying to rank different countries to decide which is the worst in Europe is, to quote one leading statistician, a ‘completely fatuous exercise’.
In Britain, there are two parallel reporting methods; two different sources of statistics.
One set compiled by Public Health England (PHE) records the number of deaths of people who died within 28 days of a positive test result, which does not mean the person died of Covid — although it is likely they did — just that they died following a positive test.
These are the figures collated on the government’s Covid-19 dashboard — a way of keeping the public informed on a daily basis — which appear nightly on the TV news.
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