Ok, let me explain in more detail.
The way the covid-19 daily figures are collated is as follows:
When a patient dies in hospital they are counted towards the daily covid-19 figures we get reported every day if they had a positive test (from the PCR) within 28 days prior of the date of death.
Patients who are admitted to hospital are routinely tested for covid-19 in all or nearly all hospitals.
Scenario:
A patient say on 1st August (who was asymptomatic) booked a covid-19 test because they were a contact of someone else they knew who was a positive case. They do the test and a day later on the 2nd the result comes back and surprisingly (they are asymptomatic after all) the result is that they are positive. They follow the rules as appropriate and isolate for 14 days.
They go about their life as normal after that but tragically on the 24th August they are involved in a bad road collision on their way to work. They are taken to hospital and admitted to a critical care ward and are on life-support due to their severe internal injuries. Two days later the prognosis worsens and sadly the family decide that life support is stopped and the person dies due to the multiple organ failure as a result of the collision. Upon admission this person actually had a covid-19 test which came back negative.
However, because of the positive result from earlier in the month this road traffic accident death is added to the daily covid-19 death figures due to the fact they link this death via the personal details (NHS Number, DOBs, name etc) to the database that holds all the covid-19 positive tests.
The only way in the current system would the above RTA death not be added as a covid-19 death is if the gap between this person's last positive result and the date they died was more than 28 days. No other nuance or rules are applied.
So it's not a case of any indivual nurse or doctor "inflating numbers" but the system without nuances and the tests.
You could change the abive reason for death to be seasonal flu, diabetes, cancer, injury from stabbing etc because of the constant testing on admission, the PCR inaccuracies, the fact that several asymptomatic people can test positive then you can see how the numbers might be very inflated.
In fact, do you remember when a national research unit pointed out that anybody who died and who had ever tested positive for coronavirus even if it was over 6 months ago were being added to the daily totals being reported? PHE had to 'refine' how they counted the deaths and the numbers came down by a few thousand. But you can still see that even with the '28 day refinement' how the numbers can still be inflated.
I hope that makes more sense?
