Readers will recall that on January 1st BBC Radio 5 Live broadcast an interview with Laura Duffel, the matron at King’s College Hospital, about the surge of Covid patients that had been admitted over the Christmas period.
Among other things, the matron said:
We have children who are coming in. It was minimally affecting children in the first wave. We have a whole ward of children here and I know that some of my colleagues are in the same position where they have whole wards of children with Covid…
We immediately smelt a rat. Children are more vulnerable to seasonal influenza than they are to Covid, so how could this be true? I asked the Senior Doctor to investigate and, sure enough, it looked very unlikely to be true. He wrote a piece for us entitled: “Are there wards full of children in English hospitals?“
On December 29th there were 474 Covid inpatients at Kings.
433 patients were in adult beds. A further 41 were in ICU beds (total 474)
If there had been any children with Covid in the hospital on December 29th, one would expect the total number of reported Covid patients to be greater than 474 to reflect the balance of patients in paediatric beds. So, if we assume the figures are accurate, there were no children suffering from acute Covid in Kings on December 29th.
Of course, it was possible that a “whole ward” of children suffering from COVID-19 were admitted between December 29th and January 1st, when the matron was interviewed, but, as the Senior Doctor pointed out, that was vanishingly unlikely.
For comparison, the 389-bed Great Ormond Street Hospital, London’s premier paediatric hospital, had six Covid inpatients on December 19th with one in a mechanically ventilated bed. The highest number of patients in GOSH was 11 reported on December 23rd.
Birmingham Women and Children’s Hospital reported 11 Covid inpatients on December 29th – it’s unclear how many of these patients were children.
Alder Hey paediatric Hospital in Liverpool had zero Covid inpatients.
I have been unable to find any other commentary or official data either from the UK or elsewhere in Europe or the US suggesting that hospitals have seen a dramatic upsurge in acute paediatric admissions with Covid-related symptoms. Nor have I heard this from other hospitals on the medical grapevine.
To put the known Covid risk to children into context, the ONS death statistics show that in the whole of 2020, there were 19 deaths in patients under 19 years old where COVID was mentioned on the death certificate out of 76,669 total Covid deaths (0.025%). Of these patients, 11 were aged 15-19 (essentially young adults). There have been eight deaths of children aged between 0 and 14 years – 0.01% of the total.
A listener complained to the BBC – possibly inspired by the Senior Doctor’s post – and the BBC has upheld the complaint. You can read the BBC’s decision here.
The Senior Doctor wasn’t the only person to question the veracity of the matron’s statement. The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health issued a statement the following day which said: “As of now we are not seeing significant pressure from COVID-19 in paediatrics across the UK. As cases in the community rise there will be a small increase in the number of children we see with COVID-19, but the overwhelming majority of children and young people have no symptoms or very mild illness only.”
Nonetheless, the claim that the B117 variant was more dangerous to children and the age profile of patients being admitted to hospital with COVID-19 was much lower in the second wave than the first was widely repeated in the British media and the Senior Doctor had to debunk this myth again and again on Lockdown Sceptics.
Lockdown Sceptics – working tirelessly to ‘fact check’ the torrent of bullshit about the virus being pumped out daily by the mainstream media.
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We should all report this woman to the NMC. She should be struck off, similar to the doctor who spread lies about vaccines causing autism.
https://www.nmc.org.uk/concerns-nurses-midwives/make-a-referral/member-public-referral/public-referral-form/
That has already been done. I made a referral as a member of the public rather than as a registered nurse and I was informed they’d already opened a case. It may be worth more people doing this.
https://citizenjournos.com/2021/03/10/confirmed-there-wasnt-a-whole-ward-of-covid-children-as-claimed-by-laura-duffell-of-kings-college-hospital/
It was known via FOI by January to be a bare faced lie
I have checked on the NMC website, she is still able to practice and there’s no indication of a fitness to practice hearing in the first half of April. The second half of April hearings won’t be published for another fortnight.
UK Column blew this story apart weeks ago by requesting FOI’s.
The nurse was telling ginormous porkies. But on whose behalf and on whose instruction?!
If she were honourable, she’d have refused to say anything.
So for a senior frontline healthcare professional I would urge understanding and compassion. Let’s not be vindictive like the witch finders of the Covid inquisition. As a sceptical behavioural researcher and consultant let’s be clear everyone is suffering from manipulation. The mood music from behavioural scientists is encouraging discovery bias. If the evidence isn’t there people fell compelled to find it. Just today Susan Michie in an attempt to roll back the unlocking said this arrant nonsense.
But the U.K. still finds itself in an “incredibly risky situation,” said Susan Michie, a behavioral scientist who sits on the government’s scientific advisory committee SAGE. “We’ve got a partially vaccinated population with high transmission levels still—which means lots of mutations, variants,” she said. “The more variants, the more likely there are to be variants that undermine the vaccination program.”
The fact is that almost all variant are nearly I detox all to the original wuhan variant and that none found so far has had a notable difference. Of course transmission doesn’t mean Infection much less illness, or indeed hospitalisation and death. This is orchestrated and deliberate misrepresentation of scientific facts such as the La Jolla study and the work of John Ioannadis by someone who like me, is not a life scientist but can read research.
Simple: lock them both up
Bullshit.
This woman is a perfect example of the careerist Jobsworth mindset that drives a great deal of Britain’s public sector thinking.
Get millions of people outside “clapping for the NHS” and its hardly surprising that NHS workers feel compelled to fabricate nonsense like “wards full of covid children.” The only thing better would have been “wards full of adorable covid puppies and kittens” but even the imbecilic British public has their standards of credulity.
It’s not about being vindictive, it’s about not accepting lies from people just because they work in the NHS. The truth is the truth and this is a concept that seems to have been discarded in pursuit of the official narrative around COVID, i.e. we’re all doomed, in face of all the actual data which shows nothing of the sort.
And the last person I would listen to about our “incredibly risky situation” is a behavioural scientist. Any one of those sitting on SAGE holds a large amount of responsibility for creating the hysterical reaction to this infection
She’s a MATRON, for goodness sake. Not a ‘lowly’ nurse, afraid of losing her job if she speaks out of turn. There IS no excuse and she should be disciplined in some way, if not sacked.
It’s not a case of being ”vindictive”. She knew the truth, and spoke lies instead.
The BBC propaganda was outrageous and unceasing as we all know. We knew at the time that the nurse was lying but looks like she got away with it.
The complaint is “upheld” but where is the apology for failing to check or point out this woman’s activist background, or check on the accuracy the BBC are notoriously lax about this kingd of thing.
You have to ask…. why do people do this sort of thing? I just can’t get my head around it. Its obvious such a blatant damned lie will out.
Maybe it’s because, as Drew63 says, there some in the NHS who believe all the bullshit about “it’s the envy of the world”?:-)
“Its obvious such a blatant damned lie will out.”
I don’t think it was at all obvious it would get out. This woman evidently didn’t think so. She no doubt had heard so many lies about the pandemic that she thought “Why not?”
And it never would have got out if some determined people hadn’t decided to spend time investigating.
And is this ‘matron’ going to be disciplined in any way? If she’s spread lies deliberately, then there should be punishment for doing so. How could it be anything else BUT ‘deliberate’?
Meanwhile the story has been spun as already seeded in the minds of the people who take their sole source of news from the BBC and other Mainstream media outlets.
Even now there are adverts claiming 1 in 3 transmissions are due to asymptomatic carriers of the virus. No scientific evidence for this. Quite the reverse in fact.