Deaths within five months of testing positive for Covid-19 (FOI)

Request

Someone requested a Freedom of Information request (FOI) which is published at the following link:

Deaths with the only cause recorded as Covid-19

This sounds like a request designed for use as anti-vax propaganda, because we know COVID is unlikely to be the cause of death, it will be Pneumonia or heart failure for example. This is the cause of death, not the underlying virus. So I would like the following information published please:

"Deaths where the person also had recently tested positive for COVID-19" The data to include anyone that died whilst also having tested positive for Covid-19 within five months of their death.

I am aware of a number of people who have died four to five months after recovering from COVID-19, but their immune systems were compromised by COVID-19, and they were then discovered to have previously undiagnosed underlying issues (cancer for example) which were impacted by the compromised immune system, and those were recorded as the cause of their death.

Response

The request requires the analysis of around 600 2020 deaths, plus around 400 to 500 2021 deaths, this would need to be matched against the COVID-19 positive dataset where almost 9,000 people have now tested positive. The data is not stored in one location and data is collected for different purposes so will not directly match.

Work is currently underway to include a similar analysis of 2020 deaths of people who had previously tested positive within the 2020 mortality report which is due to be published in September 2021.

The Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011 does not require a Scheduled Public Authority to manipulate data in order to provide a response. Article 3 of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011 therefore applies.

Article applied

Article 3 - Meaning of “information held by a public authority”

For the purposes of this Law, information is held by a public authority if –

(a) it is held by the authority, otherwise than on behalf of another person; or

(b) it is held by another person on behalf of the authority.