Most of us, blessedly, have probably stopped regularly checking it, but as of this morning, the HSE “Covid Dashboard” is still live and being updated, for those of us interested in the progression of the pandemic. On the front page, the deadly covid death toll is still there: 7,782 Irish people, the HSE’s site claims, have lost their lives to Covid 19 since the virus first appeared on our shores.
That figure, we are told, includes “probable and possible deaths”, up to August 17th of this year.
The problem is this: Once a death is ever considered “possible or probable”, it seems to go into the HSE’s covid count and remain there indefinitely, even once Covid 19 has been ruled out as a cause of death. The old problem persists: If a person, infected with Covid 19, died in a car accident in May 2020, it appears that they are still counted, to this day, as a victim of Covid 19.
The Central Statistics Office, by contrast, looks at officially recorded deaths. Here’s what it says:
There were 3,011 registered deaths where COVID-19 was assigned as the underlying cause of death in 2021. There were a further 495 mortality records where there was a mention of COVID-19 in the narrative of the death certificate and where the underlying cause of death was not COVID-19.
There were 1,672 registered deaths where COVID-19 was assigned as the underlying cause of death in 2020. There were a further 167 mortality records where there was a mention of COVID-19 in the narrative of the death certificate and where the underlying cause of death was not COVID-19.
In 2020 and 2021, then, the CSO accounts for just 4,683 deaths in Ireland from Covid. There is no full year accounting available as yet for 2022, but for the HSE’s figures to be correct, that would mean that there would have to have been 3,100 deaths this year from Covid, making it the worst year of the pandemic to date. This, very clearly, is not true.
What we have then, at a very basic level, is the state health service promoting covid misinformation. It overstates the deaths caused by the pandemic by a factor of several thousand – and this has been a known problem for some time. Indeed, Mark Coughlan of RTE’s Prime Time reported on covid death figures in Ireland in early 2021, and found that even then, the HSE was most likely overstating the true figure for covid 19 deaths by about 1,600: RTE were able to count 3,200 “excess deaths” in Ireland at that time, compared to the official figure which was then 4,847 deaths from covid.
And in April 2021, the Coroner for Mayo, Patrick O’Connor, declared flatly that the HSE’s figures for Covid deaths “do not have a scientific basis”. This has never been convincingly contradicted, nor has any official attempt to contradict it been made. When it is stated plainly that the HSE is overstating covid deaths, the HSE responds with silence.
Perhaps you might think this does not really matter any longer, but I disagree.
For one thing, the true scale and impact of the pandemic and the wisdom of the state’s reaction to it must be measured, for the benefit of future generations of policymakers. Unfortunately, there simply is no political incentive to do so: There is no appetite in the Irish mainstream for any “dredging up” of Covid policy, because we are much more comfortable clapping ourselves on our backs: “We got through it, we all did our bit, it’s over now”.
For another thing, without any agreed data on the number of people who died from Covid (whether from Covid directly, or because they were already sick and got Covid) it becomes almost impossible to do a cost benefit analysis on the impact of pandemic policy on human life. For example, some vaccine sceptics repeatedly point to the fact that deaths in Ireland in general this year are up – and that appears to be true. The vaccine sceptics have their own explanation for that, but a perfectly convincing one, and one that deserves investigation, is whether the suspension of cancer screening services and so on to “save lives” during the pandemic is actually costing lives today. How many unscreened cancers are killing people who might otherwise have lived?
For a third thing, there’s the basic principle of it: During the pandemic there was almost unprecedented control of information and a panic about “fake news”. Yet here we have the HSE, the organ of the state, promulgating objective fake news about the pandemic even to this day.
The fact that these objectively wrong figures are still being pushed by the Health Service is a disgrace. But nobody seems to want to do anything about it, whatsoever.