A death tests positive for COVID and say pneumonia, could a decision be made to mark some of them as pure pneumonia to massage the figures?
That would need massive collusion between the state and doctors, or the state and registrars or the state and the ONS. If I thought any if those were likely, I'm not sure I'd bother getting out of bed.
End of the day, there'd still be excess deaths, so unless the ONS were fiddling the numbers, it'd be obvious something was amiss. Also, pneumonia deaths are dropping.
And now my sinister tinfoil hat...do you reckon that someone in the govt had calculated the savings on state pensions, freeing up the housing market, death taxes, etc due to aged deaths?
Someone said the same on another forum, specifically on pension costs
If you like, I'll dig out the response, but essentially, the costs of the furlough scheme alone massively dwarf any savings on pensions and ongoing healthcare.
Additionally, COVID has hit the poor disproportionally, so, with inheritance tax only kicking in at 325k for single people, and 650k for couples, very little cash will be raised from an extra 60 to 70k deaths. Even if it was 100k per person, that's only 6.5 Billion, and most people will be under the threshold, so it's likely to be much less.
