Covid-19 is an infectious disease, and a video claiming it isn’t is wrong

A video on Facebook shows a woman making several false claims about the coronavirus pandemic.

The woman describes herself as an “energy medicine practitioner” and claims to be a former radiographer.

She claims that the illness associated with the pandemic was caused by radiation, not by a virus. She claims that the World Health Organisation say that Covid-19 is not contagious. She also claims that official statistics show almost all respiratory deaths in the UK in October being categorised as Covid. All of these statements are untrue.

The pandemic is not caused by radiation

The woman in the video says, [1.00] “All the symptoms of Covid, where people were getting ill and dying during the sort of peak of the pandemic were related to radiation issues… None of this is to do with the virus. It’s not a virus. It’s to do with radiation.”

The symptoms of radiation pneumonitis and Covid are somewhat similar, but that does not mean that they are easily confused, because cases of Covid can be identified with a positive test. Reuters has written its own fact check on the subject, which explains it in more detail. The SARS-CoV2 virus, which causes Covid-19, has been isolated many times.

Nor is there any reason to believe that thousands of people in the UK have been exposed to harmful levels of radiation, let alone lethal doses. The pandemic has been wrongly linked to the radio waves of the 5G mobile phone network, but extensive research into the non-ionising radiation of 5G has found it to be safe, as we have written before. Covid outbreaks have occurred in countries that do not have 5G networks.

Covid-19 is an infectious disease

Speaking about the coronavirus, the woman in the video says: [2.39] “It’s not contagious. Even the WHO have said that it’s not contagious.”

This is not true. The World Health Organisation website says, “COVID-19 is caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which spreads between people, mainly when an infected person is in close contact with another person.”

“Ordinary” deaths are not being categorised as Covid

The woman claims that virtually all the respiratory deaths in the UK in October were wrongly categorised as Covid deaths, leaving a very low number of deaths from other respiratory causes.

She says: [3.20] “The Office of [sic] National Statistics, for October, the total number of deaths for respiratory illness was 981…That would normally include all deaths due to flu, asthma attacks, COPD, any other kind of respiratory-type illnesses. But for this year, 978 out of 981 [sic] have been categorised as Covid. And only three have been categorised as anything other than Covid…. That was the UK statistics for October, for respiratory deaths.” This is not true.

We do not yet have the right data to give a detailed breakdown of deaths by cause for the UK in October. However, we do have weekly numbers from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which tell us how many death certificates show an underlying cause of influenza or pneumonia, in the opinion of the certifying doctor. These deaths would be included as respiratory deaths, under the definition given by the woman in the video. 

This data shows that 1,239 people died with an underlying cause of flu or pneumonia, just between 3 October and 30 October in England and Wales alone—not three. And of course this does not include deaths from some of the other conditions the woman mentioned. We can also see that 3,045 people in England and Wales died from Covid in this period, not 978.

It is likely that the woman in the video was misremembering or misdescribing the ONS data for the week ending 23 October, rather than the whole month. In this week, 978 death certificates mentioning Covid were registered in England and Wales, and 996 listed a respiratory disease as the underlying cause of death. (The second figure was 981 in the week that the video was posted, but has since been revised.)

This does not mean that 978 out of 996 respiratory deaths were classified as Covid, because the respiratory diseases are classified separately in this data.

They refer to any causes of death given a code between J00 and J99 in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) manual. Covid, on the other hand, is recorded with a separate emergency code that was issued this year, either U07.1 or U07.2. In other words, the Covid deaths are not a subset of the respiratory deaths. (You can see this by looking at the following week, when there were more Covid deaths than total respiratory deaths.)

Death certificates can also mention more than one condition as a cause, but only one as the underlying cause, so there may have been many more deaths certificates where respiratory disease was mentioned. There may have been some deaths which are counted in both categories, if Covid was mentioned but a different respiratory disease was listed as the underlying cause.

As we have written before, the real number of people dying from influenza or pneumonia has been lower than usual this year. This is not surprising, since many of the social distancing and hygiene measures introduced to reduce the spread of Covid would be likely to reduce the spread of other infectious diseases as well. It does not indicate that a large number of Covid deaths are being wrongly categorised.