If it's online it's fair game for copying
I do not believe that this is true from a legal point of view.
From a practical point of view, it's pretty much impossible to stop anyone from doing so.
But I wouldn't want to get a forum into trouble by posting copyright material on it.
My daughter is a GP:
since lockdown, most appointments in her group of practices have been by telephone consultation, for obvious reasons (including the fact that you can offer them while you are isolating or shielding!).
Not bothering the GP ended early in May, so her workload has been full-on since then, and telephone consultation is significantly more demanding and time consuming than face to face.
I am sure hard evidence of GPs sitting around doing nothing would interest the mainstream media.
For the record, I was not suggesting that GP's are sitting round twiddling their fingers waiting - I'm sure that isn't the case.
But I think it is not unreasonable to wonder if GP's are failing to diagnose things that they would have if they had been able to have the patient in front of them.
I did say it was more opinionated for a factual article for my liking. I haven't seen the facts laid out better elsewhere though, and facts are facts, even if those communicating the facts have an agenda.
*However*, all that being said, I was angling for analysis of the information about death certification, and whether there are errors in that. Ignore the opinionated bit at the start and the out-of-date bit at the end
Fair point. So you did. Well, my approach would be to see if I can find information elsewhere.
There is an article in the
Independent, including
The
coronavirus pandemic has sparked many crazy conspiracy theories on
social media. One of these is the notion that doctors issuing death certificates are either writing
Covid-19 to inflate the overall numbers of deaths, or deliberately omitting it to play the numbers down.
The online warriors spouting such theories rarely have any background in healthcare, but they nevertheless seem equally confident in their claims that we medics are being financially incentivised to ramp up or play down the true figures on Covid-19 deaths, or are somehow pressurised by the authorities to breach our own professional codes. These conspiracy theorists and also love to tell the world that doctors sometimes write Covid-19 on certificates when there had not been a positive test, as if this is a revelation.
To summarise, an NHS doctor explains:
- They don't have to just put one thing - they can give a cause of death and then other factors that have contributed. So Covid-19 can be given as the cause, or as a contributory factor.
- It's not unreasonable to put a death down as Covid-19 when all the symptoms and test results suggest it even without a specific Covid-19 positive result - which in their experience can often show negative for a patient and a later test shows positive
- There is no incentive for doctors to suddenly drop their professional ethics.
I would imagine that the author of the article you found would dismiss this as mainstream media propaganda. And there's not much I can say to that.
