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’. (More) https://twitter.com/inproportion2/status/1283355010399637504

So most respiratory deaths in the UK are down to bronchopneumonia, pneumonia, old age or similar. We don’t 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 respiratory infection deaths. Since the emergence of Covid-19, the list of notifiable diseases 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. In the current climate, anyone with a positive test for Covid-19 will certainly be known to clinical staff looking after them..

So, if any of these patients dies, staff will annotate Covid-19 designation on the death certificate — contrary to usual practice for most respiratory infections of this kind. There is a big difference between Covid-19 causing death, and Covid-19 being found in someone who died..

This gives Covid-19 the appearance of it causing increasing numbers of deaths, whether this is true or not. It might appear far more of a killer than flu only and simply because of the way deaths are recorded.