How correspondent.world has been way ahead of the world in revealing key Covid-related stories in 2020.
8 October 202011 September 2020 By PAUL MARTIN
Is it time for the UK government to get a dose of educational and medical reality? Why has the government made it compulsory to send even primary school children home if anyone in a school ‘bubble’ is shown to have coronavirus (Covid-19)?
Corona and Covid Insight Latest News
8 September 2020 By PAUL MARTIN
A primary school in England shuts down only a day after pupils return. The reaction: we told you it was so dangerous to reopen schools.
PAUL MARTIN HAS BEEN ENTERED FOR THE
BRITISH JOURNALISM AWARDS: PAUL MARTIN, CATEGORY: HEALTH.
MOTIVATION FOR HEALTH AND LIFE SCIENCES ENTRY
(Re Submissions, Articles 1 and 2) Through correspondent.world and in newspapers like the Sunday Telegraph, Paul Martin (Cainer) revealed a vital set of facts that were eventually accepted by Britain’s Chief Medical Officer. But only at least two months after Martin’s series of factual articles and critiques.
(In Submissions, Article 1) Martin showed that children aged ten or under were at minimal risk of getting Covid-19 seriously, were likely to get it much less frequently than adults and – crucially – hardly ever passed the disease on to adults.
(In Submissions, Article 2) Martin debunked national alarm over a Covid-19 related traumatic shock multi-system syndrome – with a positive story. It showed our top children’s hospital had found a treatment cocktail that reversed the danger of this disease with three to five days.
The facts Martin unearthed were acted on, but not before severe damage was unnecessarily done. Had these facts, already known to a top London hospital and communicated to the powers-that-be, been acted on, it would not have been necessary to exclude most British under-elevens from school after the strict lockdown was moderated. This could have meant far less social disruption, particularly in less privileged households.
The absence from school and nurseries for most young children lasted over five months, damaging many children’s welfare and social integration, and restricting parents wishing to go out to work or having difficulty working from home due to child-care necessities. It also unnecessary ‘spooked’ primary school teachers, making returns to school more difficult.
The skill and rigour involved in exposing this:
Martin was able to get information out of the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, which reluctantly approved a watered-down statement of fact from its top virologist (it did not want to be seen to contradict government policy). Martin also combed scientific studies worldwide to buttress the fact of child non-transmission.
(Re Submission, Article 3) As big a scoop was revealing that the initial figures for daily deaths from Covid were vastly underestimated, because of misleading and incomplete statistical collection. The article in Submission, Article 3, is the same story but with much more detail and new sources, so it is the story of 27 March that encapsulates and expands what was revealed four days earlier. The government changed its reporting system show deaths in hospitals and outside hospitals within a few days of reading Martin’s first revelations.
The skill and rigour involved in exposing this:
Martin had dug up the facts by speaking to doctors and hospital administrators, strictly off-record, and by meticulously comparing coroners’ reports with figures gleaned from sources inside the Office of National Statistics – all the while being stonewalled by the NHS and PHE.
These powerful pieces of journalism were only part of Covid-19 coverage that included revealing (before the national mainstream media)
- the UK government’s misleading jiggerey-pokery with the figures when it claimed it had reached its target of 100,000 Covid tests in a month;
- An example the UK could follow: Covid has been smashed in the European epicentre, Martin revealed. To humanise the story; he featured a bike expedition and an intensive care doctor’s marriage-proposal in Bergamo.
- the source of China’s Covid-19-causing virus: almost certainly a top laboratory, and therefore more likely to have been a covered-up mistake rather than emergence from a market;
- a serious effect of being on Covid respirators, shown by Martin as the effect on the mind, causing bizarre hallucinations that persist while recovery process occurs.
Each of the above (along with the revelations in Articles 1-3) beat the national press despite its (relatively) huge resources.
Note: the First Two submissions can be found by accessing https://correspondent.world/category/corona-and-covid/
(Note: Submission Three was published in the Sunday Telegraph and also on its website. Link is : https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/20/treatment-breakthrough-means-mysterious-covid-linked-kawasaki/
SUBMISSION 1 (showing that correspondent.world’s series of investigations statistically and from medical and scientific sources were correct in revealing that children under 11 are extremely unlikely to infect any adults, so schools for most of them should not have remained closed.)
23 August 2020 By PAUL MARTIN
At last. Britain’s top medical officer Chris Whitty has admitted what correspondent.world reported on 11 June and onwards.
He stated that the risk of young children dying from Covid-19 is tiny, and the risk of children passing it on to adults is minimal. [He adds, cautiously, that the evidence for the latter is “weaker”.]
Professor Whitty.
Professor Whitty pointed out that any dangers to children by reopening schools, combined with the minimal risk that the children will pass any disease on to adults, are far outweighed by the benefits to the children, and to society, of having fully-functional schools.
This same point was made more than two months ago by two top virologists or epidemiologists at Britain’s top children’s hospital. https://correspondent.world/in-considering-sending-children-back-to-school-parents-need-to-remember-that-their-decisions-must-be-about-balancing-all-the-different-risks-their-children-face-only-one-of-them-is-covid-19-which/2/ Since then, over 100 epidemiologists, psychologists and virologists signed an open letter to similar effect.
So the real question is: why has it taken until Saturday August 22 for the British health chief to go public with what was already known at least two months and 11 days ago [via our article]? And if he knew this over two months ago, why did he not intervene or advise the government to let him go public with this vital set of facts or conclusions?
In his BBC interview, Professor Whitty said: “There is overwhelmingly clearer evidence that the chances of children dying from Covid are incredibly small.” He said British and international evidence also showed that of this ‘incredibly small’ number, most had pre-existing health conditions.
He also looked at the spread of Covid from those children who do get infected by it. “There is much less transmission from children to adults than from adults to children,” he said.
[In a briefing to a group of religious leaders two weeks ago, Whitty had said there was no evidence worldwide that any child had infected an adult. Access to any audio, video or text of his remarks, in a question-and-answer session following a speech, was denied to correspondent.world at the time.]
In his remarks to the BBC on 22nd August, Professor Whitty said the “extra risk” of opening schools to the spread of Covid in society is mainly “indirect” and it was vital for children’s health and wellbeing that schools be fully reopened. He made similar remarks in a media briefing.
In this he has been backed up by Professor Russell Viner, professor of Adolescent Paediatrics at University College London, president of The Royal College of Paediatrics, and adviser to the UK government’s advisory group for emergencies.
He feels a lot of the resistance to a full return to school has come to misinformation being absorbed by parents.
“I think that fear has played a major role in this. I think we have to go back to the science and be reassured,” said the country’s top paediatrician.
He said evidence is rapidly growing that children, especially pre-teenagers, transmit the disease very seldom if ever to adults.
“There is very little evidence that children and young people transmit.
What information we have is very reassuring. I’ve had two emails today about studies coming out in the next couple of weeks. They are generally reassuring, [showing] that children play a very limited role – and schools too – in the transmission of the disease.”
The country’s top paediatrician told BBC Newsnight he does not see any need for children at schools to wear masks, saying especially younger children will touch their masks then their faces and so actually be more likely to absorb the virus causing Covid-19.
He added: “For teenagers, we don’t have the evidence that this is useful.”
Professor Viner suggested that even in high schools, “the evidence that they transmit … is not very high. If we go back to the evidence, young people can transmit but we are not seeing large levels of transmission in schools.”
He admitted though that as children get older their pattern of infection and transmission will become more like adults, but maintained that they are much more likely to catch the virus from contacts made outside school, and to pass it on outside school.
Parents and teachers unions had expressed worry about what to do if some Covid-19 was identified within the school environment.
But Professor Viner said if teachers were ill with Covid-19, or a few pupils had been tested positive for Covid-19, decisions had to be taken on a local level through interaction with local Public Health England officials.
He saw no reason to restrict education at schools other than those actually shown to have pupils or teachers who tested positive for the corona-virus.
The local health officials were well versed in dealing with health hazards at schools in their area from previous contagions, Professor Viner said.
He did not say who he felt was to blame for the “fear” engendered in parents and teachers.
[Professor Viner was Clinical Director in a busy NHS teaching hospital and clinical director for children and young people for the NHS across London, responsible for leading healthcare strategy for London’s two million children and young people.]
[Professor Whitty is the Chief Medical Officer for England, Chief Medical Adviser to the UK Government, and served as the Chief Scientific Adviser at the Department of Health and Social Care and Head of the National Institute for Health Research.]
According to Office for National Statistics data there were 10 recorded deaths as “due to Covid-19” among those aged 19 or under in England and Wales between March and June 2020.
It said of the 30 outbreaks detected in schools at that time, most had likely been caused by staff members infecting other staff members, with only two instances thought to involve students infecting other students.
SUBMISSION 2
(showing how the British public and policy-makers have been misinformed about the true severity of the coronavirus death figures. After correspondent.world extracted the damning admission from Public Health England, the government announced that it was changing its method of counting the dead.)
The government says around 1,000 people died from Corona Virus up to the last weekend of March. But we can reveal the truth. The death toll in Britain from the killer virus is at least double.
27 March 2020 By PAUL MARTIN
By Paul Martin.
The Government is vastly underestimating the number of people dying of coronavirus, an investigation by correspondent.world has revealed.
In its death figures Public Health England only tells the public how many people have died from Covid-19 if those people died in hospital and had already tested positive for the killer virus.
A Public Health England source who asked for anonymity admitted that anyone brought to a hospital who died before a diagnosis of coronavirus was made, or who died on the way to a hospital, was not being counted as having the disease.
“This could mean there are four times as many deaths related to corona-virus as we are announcing,” the source said. Another source said he estimated the death toll was “at least double”.
A senior doctor at a large outer London hospital told correspondent.world: “Even if we strongly suspect a person has Covid-19, we will attribute his or her death to what is known as the underlying condition. That’s unless the Covid-19 test has been done.”
Patients brought in with serious breathing problems would normally be tested, but there are not enough kits and not enough staff to test for Covid-19 after a patient has died, the sources say.
Anyone therefore who falls ill and self-isolates, then dies before being brought to a hospital and tested, is not included in the death statistics for Covid-19.
Exact numbers of people dying before they reach hospital, or before any Covid-19 test has been done, are difficult to establish.
Coroners note down what they think are the primary and secondary causes of death. But a senior coroner told correspondent.world that doctors are under so much pressure they often do not visit homes of patients who are dying, so the death certificates often simply are based on past illnesses rather than the sudden onset of Covid-19.
In any case, the coroner told correspondent.world, the number of death certificates specifically for people who die outside hospitals is not being fed into any national database.
Tim Galley, who died on Tuesday, will have been one of those who is not counted in the Covid-19 death statistics. The 47-year-old banker from Wrexham died at home on Tuesday March 24, just two days after he developed a fever. His body was removed from his home by medics wearing protective clothing.
Galley, who had no underlying conditions, “did not want to waste NHS time” by phoning for an ambulance, his girlfriend Donna Cuthbert told the television programme North Wales Live.
After correspondent.world extracted the damning admission from Public Health England, the government announced that it is changing its method of counting the dead.
At a national media briefing on Monday 30 March, the prime minister’s stand-in, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, said: “The ONS [Office of National Statistics] will pick up also those who did not die in hospital but died in the community. I don’t expect this discrepancy to be large.”
However Raab may still not be providing a full accounting of those who have died. That is because there is no simple way to count those who have died outside hospitals or without any tests for Covid-19. The ONS and Public Health England do not have access to the coroners’ reports. And even on these reports, coronavirus or Covid-19 would most often be listed only as a secondary cause of death, or not mentioned, if there were a pre-existing condition already known to the general practitioners.
NOTE: Finally this claim of at least double the number of deaths, as opposed to the figures being given out by the government, has been acknowledged… but only on 21 April ! The Independent (quoting Financial Times): UK coronavirus death toll more than double hospital figure, new analysis suggests
Meanwhile in another telling sign that the battle is out of control, correspondent.world has learned that the world-renowned Great Ormond Street Children’s hospital has laid on an additional 200 beds. These are for children being moved out of normal hospitals with illnesses other than Covid-19.
The additional capacity will allow University College Hospital and others in London to free up beds for an expected influx of corona-virus adult patients, a different NHS source told correspondent.world. This extra capacity, it is feared, will be needed even as the Excel Centre readies four thousand new beds specifically for Coronavirus patients.
The source asked that her name not be revealed, as staff have been told not to communicate with the media.
The source revealed that an astonishingly high number of adult patients will need to be kept alive on ventilators by the end of April. The estimate is 40 thousand.
“We are actively planning that we will need to transfer adult ventilated patients out of London to other ITUs around the country as the demand will be so great. There will be 40,000 adults needing ventilation by the end of April,” the source wrote.
Meanwhile an NHS source said that adults and children suffering from cancer and other diseases will die in greater numbers than before, as hospitals narrow their focus and resources to corona virus patients.
Statistics ‘vastly underestimate’ crisis in British hospitals over the corona virus.
22 March 2020 By PAUL MARTIN
The Government is vastly underestimating the number of people dying of coronavirus, an investigation by correspondent.world has revealed.
In its death figures Public Health England only tells the public how many people have died from Covid-19 if those people died in hospital and had already tested positive for the killer virus.
A medical source explained that anyone brought to a hospital who died before a diagnosis of coronavirus was made, or who died on the way to a hospital, was not being counted as having the disease.
“This could mean there are four times as many deaths related to corona-virus as we are announcing,” the source said. Another source said he estimated the death toll was “at least double”.
A senior doctor at a large outer London hospital told correspondent.world: “My colleagues say even if they strongly suspect a person has Covid-19, we will attribute his or her death to what is known as the underlying condition – unless the Covid-19 test has been done.”
Patients brought in with serious breathing problems would normally be tested, but there are not enough kits and not enough staff to test for Covid-19 after a patient has died, the sources say.
Anyone therefore who feels ill and self-isolates, then dies without being brought to a hospital and tested, is not included in the death statistics for Covid-19.
Meanwhile correspondent.world has learned that Great Ormond Street Children’s hospital has laid on an additional 200 beds for children being moved out of normal hospitals. Great Ormond Street is the country’s leading children’s hospital. It refused to comment.
The cutting-edge University College Hospital and others in London have been transferring all of their child patients, to make way for an expected influx of corona-virus adult patients, a different NHS source told correspondent.world.
The source asked that her name not be revealed, as staff have been told not to communicate with the media.
The source revealed that an astonishingly high number of adult patients will need to be kept alive on ventilators by the end of April.
“We are actively planning that we may need to transfer adult ventilated patients out of London into other ITUs around the country as the demand will be so great. If things continue to escalate, there will be 40,000 adults needing ventilation by the end of April,” the source revealed.
Meanwhile an NHS source said that adults and children suffering from cancer and other diseases will die in greater numbers than before, as hospitals narrow their focus and resources to corona virus patients.
SUBMISSION 3
(showing that the nationwide alarm reported about the sudden mysterious Covid-related deaths of two boys was not any reason to stop pre-teenage children going to school or playing together, as our doctors have discovered a treatment for this very rare disease that works within 3 to 5 days)
Mysterious Covid-linked disease ‘no longer expected to be fatal’ in children after treatment breakthrough
Dr Karyn Moshal, from Great Ormond Street Hospital, says children are recovering within three to five days
By Paul Martin 20 June 2020 • 5:00pm
A breakthrough in treatment means that a mysterious Covid-linked children’s inflammatory syndrome is “no longer expected to be fatal”, a top paediatrician has said.
Dr Karyn Moshal, a senior consultant in paediatric infectious diseases at Great Ormond Street Hospital (Gosh) in London, said that youngsters who show symptoms are now recovering within three to five days.
In April, Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, ordered an urgent investigation into a reported rise in children needing intensive care after contracting Covid-19 after the NHS issued an alert to GPs. It led to calls for schools to stay closed, and panic among parents.
But Dr Moshal said that condition is now “no longer expected to be fatal”, after a combination of treatments were rapidly developed by doctors.
“It was a brand-new phenomenon and we had to make quick decisions in the absence of evidence,” Dr Moshal said.
“A multi-disciplinary, multi-hospital team designed a treatment plan using drugs which we have evidence works well in both toxic shock syndrome and Kawasaki disease.
“We used Intravenous Immunoglobulin together with Methylprednisolone, a similar steroid preparation to the drug that Oxford was testing (Dexamethasone). Then for those who were most ill, or were taking a little longer to respond, we added an immune modulatory therapy.
“Individual treatment plans were discussed and agreed by this group, and response to treatment monitored. It’s this combination that has proved successful.”
Gosh, the country’s leading children’s hospital, has dealt with between 50 and 60 children with Paediatric Inflammatory Multi-System Syndrome (PIMS-TS), which is a large proportion of the cases found in Britain.
These were first reported in March, when eight children, six of them of African-Carribean origin, were rushed to the Evelina London Children’s Hospital. One of those, a 14-year-old, died. They had high fevers, rashes, red eyes, swelling and general pain.
The sudden illness showed some similarities with the extremely rare toxic shock syndrome, and with Kawasaki disease, a condition that affects around one in 10,000 children under the age of five. Kawasaki patients have a rash and swollen glands in the neck, as well as dry and cracked lips.
But PIMS-TS syndrome strikes at older children, from ages seven up to the age of 16.
A small number of children, who had coronavirus symptoms develop a hyperinflammatory syndrome. This is a disordered immune response to infection, which results in severe illness and sometimes shock, Dr Moshal said.
“This contrasts with most cases we have seen of Covid-19 in children, where it is usually very mild. In a very small number of cases where children have, or have had, Covid-19, children experience a ‘disordered over-reaction’ of their immune systems which results in severe disease,” she told The Telegraph.
To find a way to treat PIMS-TS, paediatric intensive care doctors and paediatric infectious diseases specialists at Great Ormond Street Hospital adapted their experience of treating similar disease processes, Dr Moshal said. This had been done in collaboration with colleagues at two other large London paediatric centres, Evelina and St. Mary’s.
Britain has been the world leader in recognising and treating PIMS-TS, Dr Moshal said.
“We noticed a pattern of clinical symptoms and signs in a number of patients over a short period of time, which seemed to indicate a new disease syndrome, distinct from Kawasaki Disease and Toxic Shock Syndrome and sent out alerts worldwide,” she explained.
“Hospitals then started to report that they had seen a similar phenomenon but had not recognised it as a distinct and new syndrome, initially.”
Paul Martin is editor of correspondent.world