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Not everyone has been vaccinated -- far from it. So, even though I have already received the first dose of the pfizer vaccine (that's what I was offered; i would not have hesitated for any of the others), I would still in an indoor setting where you have lots of people wear a mask out of courtesy, especially so if I got into an elevator. Really no big deal.
Most deaths being attributed to Covid are in patients with co-morbidities. With the average age of a Covid death being nearly equal to life expectancy, years of life lost will be lower than regular flu.
Early on, experienced modelers drew parallels between COVID-19 and the Spanish flu (https://www.imperial.ac.uk/mrc-global-infectious-disease-analysis/covid-19/report-9-impact-of-npis-on-covid-19/. (Accessed 2 June 2020)) that caused >50 million deaths with mean age of death being 28. We all lament the current loss of life. However, as of June 18, the total fatalities are ∼450,000 with median age ∼80 and typically multiple comorbidities.
How many YLL can we expect when Covid victims are near to life expectancy?
2. According to the Worldometer, there are 164 million cases, with 3.4 million deaths, in a population of 7.8 billion. We are one year into the pandemic. There is a deliberate attempt to inflate the death count and minimize the case count, to make it appear that this virus is orders of magnitude worse than the flu. Are we to believe that such a small percentage of the world's population has been infected given the number of cases?
As an internist I've spent my entire professional life taking care of these high risk patients. Most of these patients would have had years of quality life left. Of course some don't. But why are all these people suddenly dying all over the world if not because of Covid 19?
You're committing a fallacy that is referred to as a self-defeating prophecy.
A self-defeating prophecy (self-destroying or self-denying in some sources) is the complementary opposite of a self-fulfilling prophecy; a prediction that prevents what it predicts from happening. This is also known as the prophet's dilemma. —Wikipedia
As the situation in northern Italy escalated, abstract epidemiological arguments – about exponential growth, case fatality rates and ICU capacity factor – turned into horrifying stories and images, of wartime triage of the weak and elderly, of crematoria no longer able to keep up with the pile of corpses, of weeping doctors and nurses on the brink of collapse, and of elderly people dying alone, without a chance to say goodbye to their loved ones.
Every prophet of doom with a moral conscience not only fervently hopes that their predictions will be proven wrong, they will also try their utmost to bring this about. If this happens, we can talk about a “self-defeating prophecy”, the lesser-known cousin of the “self-fulfilling prophecy”. Alas, one major drawback of such prophecies is that sceptics will inevitably come forward and say: “You see – we told you it wouldn’t be all that bad.” In fact, you can see people committing that logical fallacy right now.
Take the shocking report of the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team, published on March 16. In this document, prepared by a team of Britain’s top epidemiologists, the authors modelled the effects of different measures on the COVID-19 epidemic, from mild “mitigation” policies (such as isolating the elderly, banning large events and closing schools) to more stringent “suppression” policies (social distancing of the entire population, home isolation of cases and household quarantine of their families). In their baseline scenario, in which the virus was allowed to spread unchecked, the capacity of ICU beds in the UK would have been exceeded 30 times over and half a million people would die.
Despite a widespread misconception, the case fatality rate (CFR) of a virus is not some biological constant or intrinsic trait – it is a function of context and circumstances. If all the available mechanical ventilators are occupied, then every next patient who needs one will most likely die. This is also why it is misleading to extrapolate from the observed fatality rate during the early outbreak on the cruise ship Diamond Princess, as even the world-renowned epidemiologist John Ioannidis did in a much-cited essay. (By the way, since the time of his writing, five more passengers have died, increasing the fatality rate by more than 70%.)
As the novelist Frank Herbert once said: “The function of sci-fi is not to predict the future, but to prevent it.” That leads us into a strange paradox: the better we manage to contain this pandemic, the less we will learn from it. Because there is one thing you can bet on for sure: as soon as this whole crisis blows over, the same minimalists will come forward and claim that it wasn’t as bad as the “fearmongers” had told us. Indeed, some of them are already busy committing that very fallacy.
Cancer and heart disease are the largest causes of death among the elderly. Heart disease is often a complication of diabetes. The fewer patients who die from respiratory illnesses, the greater the number who will die from the two major causes. Prior to 2020, these deaths wouldn't make the news.
@Ahmed Fares
This pandemic wasn't managed. Nothing was done until March 2020, by which time it was too late to contain the outbreak. Covid patients were transferred to nursing homes, where the virus would spread, and be the cause of a majority of deaths. In Italy, patients were given huge does of an anti-malarial drug, which compromised their immune systems. So much for protecting the vulnerable.
The response was so incompetent that a repeat of Spanish influenza would have led to mass graves in much of the developed world.
What is being pointed out by critics is what the data is showing now, and 6 months ago. The deaths of 3 million people with a median age of 80 (with co-morbidities) is not as bad a crisis as is being portrayed.
You are telling this to me a recently retired internist?
During the Pandemic there of course many excess deaths over the usual. And about 1/3 of these were non-Covid 19. Many of these excess deaths were cardiac related.
But also, many of the people dying because of Covid 19 had a cardiac complication resulting in death.
Most of all of these groups would have lived significantly longer if Covid 19 never happened. Including many of the the non-Covid deaths, which in so many cases was a secondary result of the Pandemic. Either due to fear of accessing health care during the Pandemic, or due to difficulty in accessing HC due to the delays and roadblocks created by Pandemic protocols.
The elderly have to die of something. An increase in cardiac/cancer deaths came in large part due to a decrease in deaths from infectious diseases. And from a decrease in deaths from other causes. Its sort of like squeezing a balloon.
In developing countries, infectious diseases still claim more lives.
Excess deaths are a tragedy, but some tragedies are more significant than others. And there is a silver lining if we consider mortality displacement.
Surely I don't need to explain that the death of a 28 year old isn't equivalent to the death of an 80 year old.
Covid has a 99% survival rate. Otherwise healthy people survive it, even when they're in their 80s. That cannot be said for people who have one foot in the grave, but don't realize it, because their body isn't prepared for a physical challenge.
Every winter there are men who die prematurely because they were out of shape and had to shovel snow. It's not news. The lack of preventative health care in wealthy countries is not news. The focus is on treating illness, while making profit.
You are saying that we sacrifice a portion of our elderly for reasons of public convenience and general economic gain. And I can go along with that after the Pandemic generally concludes. As the vaccines takes hold and we come out of the Pandemic this summer, most likely we will enter a similar phase as Influenza. Possibly more virulent. But by then we have the Pandemic contained, more knowledge, less mass infections, better containment and treatments. And very likely annual booster shots, possibly included with the flu shot. The elderly will of course continue to be at more risk, as they are and have been for most things medical.
The idea that deaths are inflated is just wrong. We know this by the excess death data. If anything it's the opposite, a lot of people died without ever being tested.. He's been wrong about a lot of stuff but when Fauci said it was 10x worse than the flu on like day 10 of the pandemic, it turned out to be about right.
To justify lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccination of the entire population, the virus has to be shown to be a threat to the entire population. Deaths recorded as "with" Covid undermine the case for these measures.
And the measures have failed. Covid has undoubtedly infected a majority of the world's population, while the vulnerable were left unprotected. What has improved is treatment, whether that be a vaccine or asthma medication to address a specific symptom.
Reliance on a vaccine to prevent infection by respiratory viruses is unproven. These critters will mutate. I have no objection to vaccinating whoever wants to be vaccinated, as was the case with the flu vaccine. To subject the entire population to this sort of experiment is unjustified.
@Joe
We know it's inflated because of the way it is categorized. We never read about people dying "with" malaria or "with" malnutrition. Deaths that are due to multiple factors can't be added together.
There were just a wee bit of reason why hospitals all over the world decided to abruptly pivot into Pandemic mode last spring. China and Italy. The medical communities all over the world lacked pertinent information and knowledge concerning the virus, its spread and its treatment. These mandated that all the acute HC entities in the world had to comply. Even our rural Trump town. This was apolitical and strictly a medical risk decision.
And when all the local acute HC facilities do such a thing, it is then mandatory that restrictive social and business measures are needed to help reduce the chances of local overload of more serious Covid 19 cases.
The only humane way out of the Pandemic, short of persistent central totalitarian mandates as above, are the vaccines. Otherwise millions more die, and the restrictions on people and business are prolonged.
And the reason that we want to vaccinate as many as possible and as rapidly as possible, is to reduce the active viral pool size. The larger and longer that pool persists, the more chance of the emergence of a more virulent strain, or one that can bypass the vaccines.
Dying WITH Covid 19 is not so common, and is specifically not a Covid related death. You have to understand how the death certificates are filled out.
Line 1 is the immediate cause of death. Which cannot be Covid 19. This error is the basis for some of those older reports of only 5 or 6% of Covid deaths being FROM Covid. The problem was actually improperly filled out death certificates. Line one cannot be Covid 19 since you do not die of Covid 19, you die of a complication. Like respiratory failure.
Line 2 includes antecedent causes and the clinical timing. Here dying FROM Covid 19 makes sense if clinically indicated. Deaths due to multiple factors are indeed added together when appropriate on line 2.
Line 3 is where one might find Covid 19 if incidental and not related to the death. This is Covid 19 WITH. As in that one famous M/C accident where the trauma victim tested positive before he died.
Peter - There is no covert plot to confine the population and force everyone to wear masks forever muahahahhaha Dr Evil style. You fell for the election fraud nonsense too without a hint of evidence and a mountain of it to the contrary. Might need to calibrate your bs detector a bit.
hoonose - don't you get it? All those deaths from covid were people who were going to die anyways. It was a pure coincidence they had covid. Just like George Floyd was about to die anyways and the cop's knee on his neck for 9 minutes was just a simple coincidence.
China implemented their quarantine in January. What was done in the US to contain the virus between then and March?
How do you explain that some countries never implemented lockdown, let alone quarantine their population?
Where are these supposed MANDATORY policies, REQUIRING specific measures?
Some countries were prepared and others were not. That much is clear.
Among the club of the unprepared and corrupt: -Took no actions for two months, despite witnessing disturbing accounts from China. -Death estimates were issued that were in error by orders of magnitude. -We were told we had to "flatten the curve", never to hear of that phrase again. -Scientific consensus on masks were reversed without evidence. -Recommendations for social distancing were based on practical limitations, not science. In summary, the so-called experts were making it up as time went by.
Virus pool: A majority of the world's population has been infected. Dragging out this drama through the use of time consuming PCR tests won't change that fact. Enough time has passed so that we are well into another season of viral outbreaks.
@Joe
Nothing covert about the fact that a majority of Covid deaths are among the elderly, with comorbidities. The death toll is not representative of the threat to healthy individuals. Where do you suppose a 99% survival rate for Covid comes from?
All those deaths from covid were people who were going to die anyways.
Yes. A majority of them would have died within a year, according to one estimate. Some of them died as a result of the measures that were taken.
I find the 'great reset' theory silly, because those half-baked plans by the elite stand no chance of succeeding. The real world will never conform to their vision of utopia.
Election fraud: Tons of evidence from every election over the course of US history. The advent of electronic counting has made it worse. Whether the fraud perpetrated in 2020 was enough to rob Trump of victory remains to be proven. I'm not holding my breath.
Line 2 includes antecedent causes and the clinical timing. Here dying FROM Covid 19 makes sense if clinically indicated. Deaths due to multiple factors are indeed added together when appropriate on line 2.
Are you stating that FROM Covid can be indicated when there are multiple factors?
FROM, yes Covid 19. Without the antecedent of Covid 19 most all the patients would be alive today.
Between Jan and March of 2020 all the medical communities in the world were examining, discussing and beginning to plan medical policy actions based on China and then Italy. The week the medical world turned was exactly when my wife and I got infected. Turned out that some early super spreader events were at ski areas. And how we and NYC got hit.
Making these sorts of decisions in real time is very difficult. Might look easy looking back retrospectively, but it is not. My wife nearly died due to our ignorance.
That just goes to show that language is being used that doesn't correspond to reality. When a death is due to multiple factors, then it is FROM multiple factors. In those cases, Covid can be listed as a contributor, or the death described as Covid related.
The medical community, as you put it, should use terms that accurately describe what is happening. Healthy people of all age groups are not being killed by Covid. The vast majority of the deaths attributed to Covid were of people with pre-existing conditions, or by definition, antecedents.
Between January and March 2020, what measures were taken to contain the spread of the virus?
The medical community doesn't have jurisdiction over international air travel, or much of anything else in that regard. They can give input, but it is up to government to act on that advice. Our systems of governance are ill-suited for addressing global scale events, like pandemics. Decision making is divided between thousands of jurisdictions. We can take the concept of national sovereignty, and observe a similar phenomenon down the smallest municipal fiefdom.
You're describing this fiasco as if it were some well-oiled machine. Outside of a few countries that were prepared, it was not.
The Covid 19 virus does not kill you. A complication kills you. Like respiratory failure the most common. So Covid 19 is always an antecedent contributor.
Diabetes, hypertension and obesity makes you more susceptible to serious Covid 19 infection and death. But the diabetes, hypertension or obesity is not what kills you. They can be mentioned on line 3, which includes other significant medical conditions at the time of death.
The death certificate is quite useful in demonstrating the elements that begin, add to, and then end the dying process.
As you point out our medical and governmental systems did not work so well, and we surely need more thorough federal, state and local future pandemic planning.
The Covid 19 has to cause symptoms that lead to the death. The virus itself does not kill you. Same with Rabies. Probably respiratory arrest. I've never seen a Rabies case.
"Whether the fraud perpetrated in 2020 was enough to rob Trump of victory remains to be proven" There was no fraud to speak of other than the few one offs (mostly republicans illegally voting for Trump). There is no evidence, precisely zero, of any sort of widespread fraud.
On one side you have Trump with his dementia, senile Rudy, a drunk blonde woman, a woman that can't tell Chinese people apart, a mentally ill former crack addict(possibly relapsed), and some fake "hearings" in hotel ballrooms that have nothing to do with a court.
On the other side you have election officials from every state saying no fraud, multiple recounts (by hand and by machine, all agreeing with each other), vote audits, signature audits, machine audits, the TX republican secretary of state saying his office searched for 22,000 hours and found nothing, and we have Rudy steadfastly refusing to provide any evidence of fraud in court despite being explicitly given the opportunity to do so, and more than 60 other court cases where team Trump lost.
In their fund raising emails they gave the game away, most of the money went to a Trump controlled pac. Very little went to "stop the steal". It was a fund raising scam. I've never seen something so obviously made up out of whole cloth before. It's as dumb as those doomsday cults that double down after their leader guy is wrong about the date.
Are you worried about that invisible pink elephant on your lap? You can't prove it's not there.
and I didn't even get into the huge chavez, venezuela, cuba, china, iran, serbia, spain, germany, democrats filling out ballots in the other room, antifa, the clinton foundation, the algorithms, Dominion sending an exec to personally oversee the cheating in Detroit, and god knows what else I've forgotten it was such a firehose of nonstop horseshit... You interested in purchasing a bridge?
Where has there been a full recount by hand? They are attempting to do one in Arizona, as we speak.
Instead of allowing such challenges to proceed, there is political interference and everything ends up as a dispute in court. Why is this?
The US electoral system is a joke. Banana republic level of corruption. In many jurisdictions there are no paper ballots to audit since they are not the ones that are fed into the tabulators. Different systems and procedures at the state and county level.
The gold standard is hand-marked ballots counted by hand in public. Without that safeguard, electronic voting systems are open to manipulation.
Untreated rabies is 100% fatal. It attacks the nervous system, which will cause complications, which will be fatal. As far as the general public is concerned, there is no doubt that it is the virus that killed the person.
To not state the obvious from a medical standpoint is peculiar.
Is there a similar situation with poisoning? e.g. A fatal dose of cyanide is ingested. What will the death certificate say?
Peter- Georgia was counted 3 times, once by hand and twice by machine. Georgia did a signature audit and did an audit of the machines as well. Found no fraud.
"Instead of allowing such challenges to proceed, there is political interference and everything ends up as a dispute in court." I don't know what challenges you're talking about, but all the recounts and audits did proceed. It was Trump that brought the cases, they didn't just "end up" there. In addition to Georgia's recounts and audits, AZ did 2 audits, Wisconsin did 2 recounts and the TX republican secretary of state said his office searched for 22,000 hours and found a measly 16 possible cases. And with the lawsuits Trump filed, he lost something like 63 out of 64 of them. The one they did win didn't actually disqualify any previously counted votes so it had no effect on the outcome. They presented no evidence at all of fraud in any of the cases. All that bullshit about how we have stacks of evidence, none of it ever showed up in court.
This election has been looked at. There is just absolutely no evidence of fraud of any scale. Not only is there a total lack of evidence in the vote, there's no evidence of any of the organization or planning. A conspiracy of this scale would require hundreds if not thousands of people. You have election officials in all 50 states, a few dozen judges (many appointed by either Trump or other republicans), elections workers etc.
Arizona is doing a full audit now, after months of litigation. An audit (i.e. statistical sampling) is not a recount.
To my knowledge, Nevada was supposed to do a full hand count, as per the system they have in place. If they did, kudos to them.
In other states, a conventional ballot count is insufficient, or impossible. The machines have to be verified, along with the ballots or images used in tabulation, the logs, the software, the signatures in the case of mail-in ballots, and what not. It's a complex process because in America, you insist on using technology in place of paper, pencil, ballot boxes, and human eyeballs.
Remember the spectacle of having to assess punch cards with dangling chads on them? Real good show for the world to see.
Your system is not set up to verify what is supposedly an automated process. You could have a paper ballot backup, but no such standard exists across jurisdictions. No election is 'looked at' unless the vote is close enough to warrant it. What you have in the US is an honor system. Which is laughable given what goes on with regard to your political class. That I have to explain this shows that Americans have no understanding of the mechanics of democracy.
Election integrity is a foundational issue. It was an issue long before Trump and his clown show came to Washington. If Americans are satisfied with gerrymandering, voter suppression, long lines at polling stations, and unverified vote counts, then they are fools. By international standards, US elections fail the same criteria they routinely accuse other countries of violating.
On the other hand, why bother? A two party system where both parties serve the same interests, is not worth any scrutiny whatsoever. It's not democracy, it's theater.
I presented the few cases where Covid was the cause of death, precisely because there was no indication of hypertension, obesity, or diabetes. Nothing is stopping anyone from counting those deaths as death by Covid, while the rest are counted as Covid-related.
Nothing that is, but a desire to scare the public into believing false narratives.
There of course have been cases of Covid 19 deaths in those with no prior medical history. But what happened is that in those deaths many of their death certificates were improperly filled out. Resulting in misinterpretation of the the numbers of Covid 19 deaths. Covid 19 cannot be alone on the death certificate because it is not an immediate cause of death.
Peter- You're moving the goal posts. Anything less than an inspector watching every one vote isn't going to be enough for you. This is indicative of irrational cult like beliefs. You believe there was fraud so nothing will change your mind. No different than the doomsday cult leader prediction not coming true.
GA was a full count of all ballots. WI did a recount in two different areas where Trump said there was fraud, none was found. AZ audited Democratic Maricopa county twice and found no fraud. Yes, audit are samples, but fuck man, if Trump says he won in a "landslide" then you should easily find the fraud. which they have not. It was all made up. You really can't see that? He was screaming fraud before the election, we all knew he'd scream fraud after the election and that's exactly what he did.
They spun wild tales that no reasonable person would take seriously. Anyone claiming fraud is seriously lacking in any sort of critical thinking skills.
Just what version of the fraud conspiracy do you believe in? Machines flipping votes? Definitively proved wrong in GA by multiple recounts and a machine audit. Fake ballots voter fraud? Logistically impossible, and pretty much proved wrong by the TX secretary of state, GA signature audit, and AZ audits. What's going on in AZ now isn't to be taken seriously. It is an outfit of zealots that have been condemned by Republicans in AZ. They've spun these wild conspiracies of ballots from China containing bamboo and Trump ballots being fed to chickens and then incinerated the chickens to hide the evidence. This is obvious lunacy.
Look, Rudy refused to provide evidence in court despite him claiming he had mountains of it. That's a dead giveaway that he was lying the entire time. Every single time, without exception, when he was under oath, he produced NOTHING. If *any* of this were real, why invent all the fantastical tales about servers in Germany, and antifa, and machines flipping votes etc?
Those claiming fraud say no one looked for it. That's just factually false. It's a religious belief. People who believe it don't know the existing facts (you didn't even know GA was counted 3 times, once by hand) nor do they care. They *know* their god was robbed, so therefore it *must* be true.
Having machines count votes without verification is an honor system. You can't rule out fraud until a verification is done. The current process is unacceptable.
The issue of fraud as far as the presidential election was concerned, ended in December. There was a deadline concerning the certification of electors. The Trump legal team blew their chance to get results overturned through the courts. As far as I and most everyone was concerned, that was the end of it. Biden is confirmed.
If mandatory vote verification were the norm, all machine counts in all states would have been confirmed (or corrected) by a hand count of voter marked ballots. The work would have started on election night and be done within days. It avoids a ton of forensics, which is what is taking place in Arizona. No need to count machine ballots, or replacement ballots, or the software and hardware. Hand counting by human beings keeps the electronic system honest.
An alternative proposal is to make machine ballots available to the public, so that anyone can take ballot images and run them through optical scan software of their choice, to see if errors show up. Addressing errors found would entail much more work than the manual paper ballot method, but it would keep the system honest.
The easiest way to steal an election is to have the software do vote weighting. No need to generate invalid ballots or move any physical ballots around.
Arizona is unlikely to change anything even if they find fraud. You either believe that election integrity is important, or you don't. Americans don't even care about the rigging that is out in the open, like gerrymandering. Or the nonsense surrounding voter rolls.
We don't have any of this shit in Canada. You tick a box on your income tax and Elections Canada ensures that you are on federal and provincial voting lists. Votes and counted by hand in the open on election night, and it's usually complete by 2 or 3 AM Eastern time. For most of the races, the media can project the outcome before all the votes are reported in. If the election is not too close, they can predict a winner and make that announcement before midnight. We don't need machines to count votes faster.
The pandemic death count is a combined number, at least on the Worldometer. If there are errors, they will only be seen by those digging into the source data. Criticism of the pandemic response originates from people looking into the source data, in addition to the metrics that are published.
I don't expect the MSM to devote much time exploring lock down related deaths, from mental health issues to the loss of small businesses. Don't blame the policy, blame the people, or blame the virus. Anything to avoid accountability.
No argument from me that Canada does almost everything better than the US, that's generally pretty obvious. But it's also obvious all this election fraud stuff was purely made up. If it wasn't, they would have presented evidence in court and they wouldn't have made up the rest of the conspiracy about China and Venezuela and all the rest. It's as obviously made up as when Hubbard invented Xenu and thetans or when Q made up his bullshit. It was obvious even before they did all the recounts and audits.
AZ election officials now say Maricopa county should replace their voting machines after this band of crackpot zealots took control of them, not that these guys are smart enough to actually modify a machine... Seriously, many of these schmucks think Trump ballots were fed to chickens and then the chickens were incinerated.. On what planet does that make any sense whatsoever? Bamboo fibers? We're way past the point of this being embarrassing.
The government narrative is that lock downs saved lives. Therefore they will not report on evidence to the contrary.
From the JAMA article, we have this comment:
April 3, 2021 Death Certificates May Not Tell All - Suicide Gary Ordog, MD, DABEM, DABMT | County of Los Angeles, Department of Health Services, (retired) Thank you for your interesting article. Death certificates may not tell the entire story. I was surprised by the suicide rate reported to have a major decrease in 2020. It seems from most other reports that the suicide rate has increased since the pandemic began. This may be explained by the fact that the category of "Unintentional Injury" had a major increase at the same time, and the fact that this category includes drug overdoses. As there is often inadequate history in a fatal drug overdose case, many of these may be purposeful and so suicidal. This would explain the perceived increase in suicide rate since the current pandemic began. Perhaps further analysis of the data would elucidate this incongruity. Thank you again for your presentation. Gary Joseph Ordog, MD. CONFLICT OF INTEREST: None Reported
Another letter is critical of relying on death certificates:
March 31, 2021 "Two Statisticians' View" of Leading Causes of Death Elisabet Englund, Professor | Lund University Hospital, Lund, Sweden Albeit of great interest, it is important to know that the given numbers come from death certificates.
All of us who work with / read the reports from autopsy pathologists know that the reality is different when actually examining the deceased.
A clinically unknown tumor is found in a large proportion of our cases, and so are unknown, potentially treatable infections. Clinically known/registered covid-19 patients die from various immediate causes. On top of that, a number of unknown covid-19 cases succumb - and this is shown only at autopsy with subsequent microscopical investigation.
Perhaps paving way for an exchange of knowledge,
Elisabet Englund, MD Lund, Sweden CONFLICT OF INTEREST: None Reported
Axios: By the numbers: From 2019 to 2020, deaths by suicide declined by 5.6%, from 47,511 to 44,834, per the CDC. It was the third consecutive year of decline.
53 comments:
6 feet is the practical limit for social distancing inside retail establishments.
After the deliberate overcounting of deaths and undercounting of cases, it will be shown that Covid was no deadlier than influenza.
There is an orthodoxy when it comes to defining what a virus is.
Aerosol refers to very small droplets. Whereas airborne refers to both large and small droplets.
So... airborne transmission.
PS; much calmer now. Apologies for losing my cool this morning :)
It’s all in the past Greek... don’t skate to where the puck was skate to where it’s going to be...
What a dope:
https://populist.press/aoc-denies-science-says-she-will-keep-masking-after-vaccination/
She should go back and get a real Degree... maybe get a full refund for her BA....
And Rachel Maddow sees people without masks as a threat.
@Peter Pan
Covid 19 has easily been 10X as lethal as Influenza with large populations. What the heck do you think all these people have been dying from?
Not everyone has been vaccinated -- far from it. So, even though I have already received the first dose of the pfizer vaccine (that's what I was offered; i would not have hesitated for any of the others), I would still in an indoor setting where you have lots of people wear a mask out of courtesy, especially so if I got into an elevator. Really no big deal.
"After the deliberate overcounting of deaths and undercounting of cases, it will be shown that Covid was no deadlier than influenza."
Probably... when compared to 1918 influnza pandemic.
geez, look at that. I misspelled "influenza." :(
Most deaths being attributed to Covid are in patients with co-morbidities. With the average age of a Covid death being nearly equal to life expectancy, years of life lost will be lower than regular flu.
The data does not support the hysteria.
@Peter Pan
There is no data to support your contention of years lost.
Influenza does not kill nearly so many patients. Even in a bad flu season maybe 10% of Covid 19 deaths.
1. Forecasting for COVID-19 has failed
Early on, experienced modelers drew parallels between COVID-19 and the Spanish flu (https://www.imperial.ac.uk/mrc-global-infectious-disease-analysis/covid-19/report-9-impact-of-npis-on-covid-19/. (Accessed 2 June 2020)) that caused >50 million deaths with mean age of death being 28. We all lament the current loss of life. However, as of June 18, the total fatalities are ∼450,000 with median age ∼80 and typically multiple comorbidities.
How many YLL can we expect when Covid victims are near to life expectancy?
2. According to the Worldometer, there are 164 million cases, with 3.4 million deaths, in a population of 7.8 billion. We are one year into the pandemic. There is a deliberate attempt to inflate the death count and minimize the case count, to make it appear that this virus is orders of magnitude worse than the flu. Are we to believe that such a small percentage of the world's population has been infected given the number of cases?
@Peter Pan.
As an internist I've spent my entire professional life taking care of these high risk patients. Most of these patients would have had years of quality life left. Of course some don't. But why are all these people suddenly dying all over the world if not because of Covid 19?
Peter Pan,
You're committing a fallacy that is referred to as a self-defeating prophecy.
A self-defeating prophecy (self-destroying or self-denying in some sources) is the complementary opposite of a self-fulfilling prophecy; a prediction that prevents what it predicts from happening. This is also known as the prophet's dilemma. —Wikipedia
A strange paradox: the better we manage to contain the coronavirus pandemic, the less we will learn from it
[selected quotes - bold mine]
As the situation in northern Italy escalated, abstract epidemiological arguments – about exponential growth, case fatality rates and ICU capacity factor – turned into horrifying stories and images, of wartime triage of the weak and elderly, of crematoria no longer able to keep up with the pile of corpses, of weeping doctors and nurses on the brink of collapse, and of elderly people dying alone, without a chance to say goodbye to their loved ones.
Every prophet of doom with a moral conscience not only fervently hopes that their predictions will be proven wrong, they will also try their utmost to bring this about. If this happens, we can talk about a “self-defeating prophecy”, the lesser-known cousin of the “self-fulfilling prophecy”. Alas, one major drawback of such prophecies is that sceptics will inevitably come forward and say: “You see – we told you it wouldn’t be all that bad.” In fact, you can see people committing that logical fallacy right now.
Take the shocking report of the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team, published on March 16. In this document, prepared by a team of Britain’s top epidemiologists, the authors modelled the effects of different measures on the COVID-19 epidemic, from mild “mitigation” policies (such as isolating the elderly, banning large events and closing schools) to more stringent “suppression” policies (social distancing of the entire population, home isolation of cases and household quarantine of their families). In their baseline scenario, in which the virus was allowed to spread unchecked, the capacity of ICU beds in the UK would have been exceeded 30 times over and half a million people would die.
Despite a widespread misconception, the case fatality rate (CFR) of a virus is not some biological constant or intrinsic trait – it is a function of context and circumstances. If all the available mechanical ventilators are occupied, then every next patient who needs one will most likely die. This is also why it is misleading to extrapolate from the observed fatality rate during the early outbreak on the cruise ship Diamond Princess, as even the world-renowned epidemiologist John Ioannidis did in a much-cited essay. (By the way, since the time of his writing, five more passengers have died, increasing the fatality rate by more than 70%.)
As the novelist Frank Herbert once said: “The function of sci-fi is not to predict the future, but to prevent it.” That leads us into a strange paradox: the better we manage to contain this pandemic, the less we will learn from it. Because there is one thing you can bet on for sure: as soon as this whole crisis blows over, the same minimalists will come forward and claim that it wasn’t as bad as the “fearmongers” had told us. Indeed, some of them are already busy committing that very fallacy.
@hoonose
Cancer and heart disease are the largest causes of death among the elderly. Heart disease is often a complication of diabetes. The fewer patients who die from respiratory illnesses, the greater the number who will die from the two major causes. Prior to 2020, these deaths wouldn't make the news.
@Ahmed Fares
This pandemic wasn't managed. Nothing was done until March 2020, by which time it was too late to contain the outbreak. Covid patients were transferred to nursing homes, where the virus would spread, and be the cause of a majority of deaths. In Italy, patients were given huge does of an anti-malarial drug, which compromised their immune systems. So much for protecting the vulnerable.
The response was so incompetent that a repeat of Spanish influenza would have led to mass graves in much of the developed world.
What is being pointed out by critics is what the data is showing now, and 6 months ago. The deaths of 3 million people with a median age of 80 (with co-morbidities) is not as bad a crisis as is being portrayed.
@Peter Pan.
You are telling this to me a recently retired internist?
During the Pandemic there of course many excess deaths over the usual. And about 1/3 of these were non-Covid 19. Many of these excess deaths were cardiac related.
But also, many of the people dying because of Covid 19 had a cardiac complication resulting in death.
Most of all of these groups would have lived significantly longer if Covid 19 never happened. Including many of the the non-Covid deaths, which in so many cases was a secondary result of the Pandemic. Either due to fear of accessing health care during the Pandemic, or due to difficulty in accessing HC due to the delays and roadblocks created by Pandemic protocols.
@hoonose
The elderly have to die of something. An increase in cardiac/cancer deaths came in large part due to a decrease in deaths from infectious diseases. And from a decrease in deaths from other causes. Its sort of like squeezing a balloon.
In developing countries, infectious diseases still claim more lives.
Excess deaths are a tragedy, but some tragedies are more significant than others. And there is a silver lining if we consider mortality displacement.
Surely I don't need to explain that the death of a 28 year old isn't equivalent to the death of an 80 year old.
Covid has a 99% survival rate. Otherwise healthy people survive it, even when they're in their 80s. That cannot be said for people who have one foot in the grave, but don't realize it, because their body isn't prepared for a physical challenge.
Every winter there are men who die prematurely because they were out of shape and had to shovel snow. It's not news. The lack of preventative health care in wealthy countries is not news. The focus is on treating illness, while making profit.
@Peter Pan
You are saying that we sacrifice a portion of our elderly for reasons of public convenience and general economic gain. And I can go along with that after the Pandemic generally concludes. As the vaccines takes hold and we come out of the Pandemic this summer, most likely we will enter a similar phase as Influenza. Possibly more virulent. But by then we have the Pandemic contained, more knowledge, less mass infections, better containment and treatments. And very likely annual booster shots, possibly included with the flu shot. The elderly will of course continue to be at more risk, as they are and have been for most things medical.
The idea that deaths are inflated is just wrong. We know this by the excess death data. If anything it's the opposite, a lot of people died without ever being tested.. He's been wrong about a lot of stuff but when Fauci said it was 10x worse than the flu on like day 10 of the pandemic, it turned out to be about right.
@hoonose
To justify lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccination of the entire population, the virus has to be shown to be a threat to the entire population. Deaths recorded as "with" Covid undermine the case for these measures.
And the measures have failed. Covid has undoubtedly infected a majority of the world's population, while the vulnerable were left unprotected. What has improved is treatment, whether that be a vaccine or asthma medication to address a specific symptom.
Reliance on a vaccine to prevent infection by respiratory viruses is unproven. These critters will mutate. I have no objection to vaccinating whoever wants to be vaccinated, as was the case with the flu vaccine. To subject the entire population to this sort of experiment is unjustified.
@Joe
We know it's inflated because of the way it is categorized. We never read about people dying "with" malaria or "with" malnutrition. Deaths that are due to multiple factors can't be added together.
A deeper dive into excess mortality:
Excess Mortality - What You Aren't Being Told
There were just a wee bit of reason why hospitals all over the world decided to abruptly pivot into Pandemic mode last spring. China and Italy. The medical communities all over the world lacked pertinent information and knowledge concerning the virus, its spread and its treatment. These mandated that all the acute HC entities in the world had to comply. Even our rural Trump town. This was apolitical and strictly a medical risk decision.
And when all the local acute HC facilities do such a thing, it is then mandatory that restrictive social and business measures are needed to help reduce the chances of local overload of more serious Covid 19 cases.
The only humane way out of the Pandemic, short of persistent central totalitarian mandates as above, are the vaccines. Otherwise millions more die, and the restrictions on people and business are prolonged.
And the reason that we want to vaccinate as many as possible and as rapidly as possible, is to reduce the active viral pool size. The larger and longer that pool persists, the more chance of the emergence of a more virulent strain, or one that can bypass the vaccines.
Dying WITH Covid 19 is not so common, and is specifically not a Covid related death.
You have to understand how the death certificates are filled out.
Line 1 is the immediate cause of death. Which cannot be Covid 19. This error is the basis for some of those older reports of only 5 or 6% of Covid deaths being FROM Covid. The problem was actually improperly filled out death certificates. Line one cannot be Covid 19 since you do not die of Covid 19, you die of a complication. Like respiratory failure.
Line 2 includes antecedent causes and the clinical timing. Here dying FROM Covid 19 makes sense if clinically indicated. Deaths due to multiple factors are indeed added together when appropriate on line 2.
Line 3 is where one might find Covid 19 if incidental and not related to the death. This is Covid 19 WITH. As in that one famous M/C accident where the trauma victim tested positive before he died.
Peter - There is no covert plot to confine the population and force everyone to wear masks forever muahahahhaha Dr Evil style. You fell for the election fraud nonsense too without a hint of evidence and a mountain of it to the contrary. Might need to calibrate your bs detector a bit.
hoonose - don't you get it? All those deaths from covid were people who were going to die anyways. It was a pure coincidence they had covid. Just like George Floyd was about to die anyways and the cop's knee on his neck for 9 minutes was just a simple coincidence.
@hoonose
China implemented their quarantine in January. What was done in the US to contain the virus between then and March?
How do you explain that some countries never implemented lockdown, let alone quarantine their population?
Where are these supposed MANDATORY policies, REQUIRING specific measures?
Some countries were prepared and others were not. That much is clear.
Among the club of the unprepared and corrupt:
-Took no actions for two months, despite witnessing disturbing accounts from China.
-Death estimates were issued that were in error by orders of magnitude.
-We were told we had to "flatten the curve", never to hear of that phrase again.
-Scientific consensus on masks were reversed without evidence.
-Recommendations for social distancing were based on practical limitations, not science.
In summary, the so-called experts were making it up as time went by.
Virus pool:
A majority of the world's population has been infected. Dragging out this drama through the use of time consuming PCR tests won't change that fact. Enough time has passed so that we are well into another season of viral outbreaks.
@Joe
Nothing covert about the fact that a majority of Covid deaths are among the elderly, with comorbidities. The death toll is not representative of the threat to healthy individuals. Where do you suppose a 99% survival rate for Covid comes from?
All those deaths from covid were people who were going to die anyways.
Yes. A majority of them would have died within a year, according to one estimate. Some of them died as a result of the measures that were taken.
I find the 'great reset' theory silly, because those half-baked plans by the elite stand no chance of succeeding. The real world will never conform to their vision of utopia.
Election fraud:
Tons of evidence from every election over the course of US history. The advent of electronic counting has made it worse. Whether the fraud perpetrated in 2020 was enough to rob Trump of victory remains to be proven. I'm not holding my breath.
Line 2 includes antecedent causes and the clinical timing. Here dying FROM Covid 19 makes sense if clinically indicated. Deaths due to multiple factors are indeed added together when appropriate on line 2.
Are you stating that FROM Covid can be indicated when there are multiple factors?
My advice:
Enjoy the great summer weather (really no need for the placebo-effect-made-in-China vitamin d pills... and, most importantly, get vaccinated.
@Peter Pan
FROM, yes Covid 19. Without the antecedent of Covid 19 most all the patients would be alive today.
Between Jan and March of 2020 all the medical communities in the world were examining, discussing and beginning to plan medical policy actions based on China and then Italy. The week the medical world turned was exactly when my wife and I got infected. Turned out that some early super spreader events were at ski areas. And how we and NYC got hit.
Making these sorts of decisions in real time is very difficult. Might look easy looking back retrospectively, but it is not. My wife nearly died due to our ignorance.
@hoonose
That just goes to show that language is being used that doesn't correspond to reality. When a death is due to multiple factors, then it is FROM multiple factors. In those cases, Covid can be listed as a contributor, or the death described as Covid related.
The medical community, as you put it, should use terms that accurately describe what is happening. Healthy people of all age groups are not being killed by Covid. The vast majority of the deaths attributed to Covid were of people with pre-existing conditions, or by definition, antecedents.
Between January and March 2020, what measures were taken to contain the spread of the virus?
The medical community doesn't have jurisdiction over international air travel, or much of anything else in that regard. They can give input, but it is up to government to act on that advice. Our systems of governance are ill-suited for addressing global scale events, like pandemics. Decision making is divided between thousands of jurisdictions. We can take the concept of national sovereignty, and observe a similar phenomenon down the smallest municipal fiefdom.
You're describing this fiasco as if it were some well-oiled machine. Outside of a few countries that were prepared, it was not.
The Covid 19 virus does not kill you. A complication kills you. Like respiratory failure the most common. So Covid 19 is always an antecedent contributor.
Diabetes, hypertension and obesity makes you more susceptible to serious Covid 19 infection and death. But the diabetes, hypertension or obesity is not what kills you. They can be mentioned on line 3, which includes other significant medical conditions at the time of death.
The death certificate is quite useful in demonstrating the elements that begin, add to, and then end the dying process.
As you point out our medical and governmental systems did not work so well, and we surely need more thorough federal, state and local future pandemic planning.
What of medical personnel who received a massive dose of Covid? Would that not qualify as death by virus?
If someone dies of rabies, what would the death certificate indicate?
The Covid 19 has to cause symptoms that lead to the death. The virus itself does not kill you. Same with Rabies. Probably respiratory arrest. I've never seen a Rabies case.
"Whether the fraud perpetrated in 2020 was enough to rob Trump of victory remains to be proven"
There was no fraud to speak of other than the few one offs (mostly republicans illegally voting for Trump). There is no evidence, precisely zero, of any sort of widespread fraud.
On one side you have Trump with his dementia, senile Rudy, a drunk blonde woman, a woman that can't tell Chinese people apart, a mentally ill former crack addict(possibly relapsed), and some fake "hearings" in hotel ballrooms that have nothing to do with a court.
On the other side you have election officials from every state saying no fraud, multiple recounts (by hand and by machine, all agreeing with each other), vote audits, signature audits, machine audits, the TX republican secretary of state saying his office searched for 22,000 hours and found nothing, and we have Rudy steadfastly refusing to provide any evidence of fraud in court despite being explicitly given the opportunity to do so, and more than 60 other court cases where team Trump lost.
In their fund raising emails they gave the game away, most of the money went to a Trump controlled pac. Very little went to "stop the steal". It was a fund raising scam. I've never seen something so obviously made up out of whole cloth before. It's as dumb as those doomsday cults that double down after their leader guy is wrong about the date.
Are you worried about that invisible pink elephant on your lap? You can't prove it's not there.
and I didn't even get into the huge chavez, venezuela, cuba, china, iran, serbia, spain, germany, democrats filling out ballots in the other room, antifa, the clinton foundation, the algorithms, Dominion sending an exec to personally oversee the cheating in Detroit, and god knows what else I've forgotten it was such a firehose of nonstop horseshit... You interested in purchasing a bridge?
@Joe
Where has there been a full recount by hand?
They are attempting to do one in Arizona, as we speak.
Instead of allowing such challenges to proceed, there is political interference and everything ends up as a dispute in court. Why is this?
The US electoral system is a joke. Banana republic level of corruption. In many jurisdictions there are no paper ballots to audit since they are not the ones that are fed into the tabulators. Different systems and procedures at the state and county level.
The gold standard is hand-marked ballots counted by hand in public. Without that safeguard, electronic voting systems are open to manipulation.
@hoonose
Untreated rabies is 100% fatal. It attacks the nervous system, which will cause complications, which will be fatal. As far as the general public is concerned, there is no doubt that it is the virus that killed the person.
To not state the obvious from a medical standpoint is peculiar.
Is there a similar situation with poisoning?
e.g. A fatal dose of cyanide is ingested. What will the death certificate say?
Peter-
Georgia was counted 3 times, once by hand and twice by machine. Georgia did a signature audit and did an audit of the machines as well. Found no fraud.
"Instead of allowing such challenges to proceed, there is political interference and everything ends up as a dispute in court."
I don't know what challenges you're talking about, but all the recounts and audits did proceed. It was Trump that brought the cases, they didn't just "end up" there. In addition to Georgia's recounts and audits, AZ did 2 audits, Wisconsin did 2 recounts and the TX republican secretary of state said his office searched for 22,000 hours and found a measly 16 possible cases. And with the lawsuits Trump filed, he lost something like 63 out of 64 of them. The one they did win didn't actually disqualify any previously counted votes so it had no effect on the outcome. They presented no evidence at all of fraud in any of the cases. All that bullshit about how we have stacks of evidence, none of it ever showed up in court.
This election has been looked at. There is just absolutely no evidence of fraud of any scale.
Not only is there a total lack of evidence in the vote, there's no evidence of any of the organization or planning. A conspiracy of this scale would require hundreds if not thousands of people. You have election officials in all 50 states, a few dozen judges (many appointed by either Trump or other republicans), elections workers etc.
Arizona is doing a full audit now, after months of litigation.
An audit (i.e. statistical sampling) is not a recount.
To my knowledge, Nevada was supposed to do a full hand count, as per the system they have in place. If they did, kudos to them.
In other states, a conventional ballot count is insufficient, or impossible. The machines have to be verified, along with the ballots or images used in tabulation, the logs, the software, the signatures in the case of mail-in ballots, and what not. It's a complex process because in America, you insist on using technology in place of paper, pencil, ballot boxes, and human eyeballs.
Remember the spectacle of having to assess punch cards with dangling chads on them?
Real good show for the world to see.
Your system is not set up to verify what is supposedly an automated process. You could have a paper ballot backup, but no such standard exists across jurisdictions. No election is 'looked at' unless the vote is close enough to warrant it. What you have in the US is an honor system. Which is laughable given what goes on with regard to your political class. That I have to explain this shows that Americans have no understanding of the mechanics of democracy.
Election integrity is a foundational issue. It was an issue long before Trump and his clown show came to Washington. If Americans are satisfied with gerrymandering, voter suppression, long lines at polling stations, and unverified vote counts, then they are fools. By international standards, US elections fail the same criteria they routinely accuse other countries of violating.
On the other hand, why bother?
A two party system where both parties serve the same interests, is not worth any scrutiny whatsoever. It's not democracy, it's theater.
@Peter Pan.
You are getting it that Covid 19 killed all these people. Not their hypertension, obesity or diabetes.
Poisonings go to the ME. With Cyanide the immediate cause of death is respiratory arrest.
@hoonose
I presented the few cases where Covid was the cause of death, precisely because there was no indication of hypertension, obesity, or diabetes. Nothing is stopping anyone from counting those deaths as death by Covid, while the rest are counted as Covid-related.
Nothing that is, but a desire to scare the public into believing false narratives.
There of course have been cases of Covid 19 deaths in those with no prior medical history. But what happened is that in those deaths many of their death certificates were improperly filled out. Resulting in misinterpretation of the the numbers of Covid 19 deaths. Covid 19 cannot be alone on the death certificate because it is not an immediate cause of death.
Peter-
You're moving the goal posts. Anything less than an inspector watching every one vote isn't going to be enough for you. This is indicative of irrational cult like beliefs. You believe there was fraud so nothing will change your mind. No different than the doomsday cult leader prediction not coming true.
GA was a full count of all ballots. WI did a recount in two different areas where Trump said there was fraud, none was found. AZ audited Democratic Maricopa county twice and found no fraud.
Yes, audit are samples, but fuck man, if Trump says he won in a "landslide" then you should easily find the fraud. which they have not. It was all made up. You really can't see that? He was screaming fraud before the election, we all knew he'd scream fraud after the election and that's exactly what he did.
They spun wild tales that no reasonable person would take seriously.
Anyone claiming fraud is seriously lacking in any sort of critical thinking skills.
Just what version of the fraud conspiracy do you believe in? Machines flipping votes? Definitively proved wrong in GA by multiple recounts and a machine audit. Fake ballots voter fraud? Logistically impossible, and pretty much proved wrong by the TX secretary of state, GA signature audit, and AZ audits.
What's going on in AZ now isn't to be taken seriously. It is an outfit of zealots that have been condemned by Republicans in AZ. They've spun these wild conspiracies of ballots from China containing bamboo and Trump ballots being fed to chickens and then incinerated the chickens to hide the evidence. This is obvious lunacy.
Look, Rudy refused to provide evidence in court despite him claiming he had mountains of it. That's a dead giveaway that he was lying the entire time. Every single time, without exception, when he was under oath, he produced NOTHING. If *any* of this were real, why invent all the fantastical tales about servers in Germany, and antifa, and machines flipping votes etc?
Those claiming fraud say no one looked for it. That's just factually false. It's a religious belief. People who believe it don't know the existing facts (you didn't even know GA was counted 3 times, once by hand) nor do they care. They *know* their god was robbed, so therefore it *must* be true.
@Joe,
Having machines count votes without verification is an honor system. You can't rule out fraud until a verification is done. The current process is unacceptable.
The issue of fraud as far as the presidential election was concerned, ended in December. There was a deadline concerning the certification of electors. The Trump legal team blew their chance to get results overturned through the courts. As far as I and most everyone was concerned, that was the end of it. Biden is confirmed.
If mandatory vote verification were the norm, all machine counts in all states would have been confirmed (or corrected) by a hand count of voter marked ballots. The work would have started on election night and be done within days. It avoids a ton of forensics, which is what is taking place in Arizona. No need to count machine ballots, or replacement ballots, or the software and hardware. Hand counting by human beings keeps the electronic system honest.
An alternative proposal is to make machine ballots available to the public, so that anyone can take ballot images and run them through optical scan software of their choice, to see if errors show up. Addressing errors found would entail much more work than the manual paper ballot method, but it would keep the system honest.
The easiest way to steal an election is to have the software do vote weighting. No need to generate invalid ballots or move any physical ballots around.
Arizona is unlikely to change anything even if they find fraud. You either believe that election integrity is important, or you don't. Americans don't even care about the rigging that is out in the open, like gerrymandering. Or the nonsense surrounding voter rolls.
We don't have any of this shit in Canada. You tick a box on your income tax and Elections Canada ensures that you are on federal and provincial voting lists. Votes and counted by hand in the open on election night, and it's usually complete by 2 or 3 AM Eastern time. For most of the races, the media can project the outcome before all the votes are reported in. If the election is not too close, they can predict a winner and make that announcement before midnight. We don't need machines to count votes faster.
@hoonose
The pandemic death count is a combined number, at least on the Worldometer. If there are errors, they will only be seen by those digging into the source data. Criticism of the pandemic response originates from people looking into the source data, in addition to the metrics that are published.
Excess death numbers IMO are most informative.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778361
Roughly 1/3 were non-Covid infection related.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2771761
Many of the non-Covid were still related to the Pandemic. Either due to fear of accessing HC, or Pandemic protocol medical delays and roadblocks.
I don't expect the MSM to devote much time exploring lock down related deaths, from mental health issues to the loss of small businesses. Don't blame the policy, blame the people, or blame the virus. Anything to avoid accountability.
Suicides are surprisingly down in 2020. Would you expect the MSM to note that?
https://www.beckershospitalreview.co...ata-shows.html
https://www.axios.com/suicide-decrea...864a24449.html
No argument from me that Canada does almost everything better than the US, that's generally pretty obvious. But it's also obvious all this election fraud stuff was purely made up. If it wasn't, they would have presented evidence in court and they wouldn't have made up the rest of the conspiracy about China and Venezuela and all the rest. It's as obviously made up as when Hubbard invented Xenu and thetans or when Q made up his bullshit. It was obvious even before they did all the recounts and audits.
AZ election officials now say Maricopa county should replace their voting machines after this band of crackpot zealots took control of them, not that these guys are smart enough to actually modify a machine... Seriously, many of these schmucks think Trump ballots were fed to chickens and then the chickens were incinerated.. On what planet does that make any sense whatsoever? Bamboo fibers? We're way past the point of this being embarrassing.
@hoonose
You'll have to post the links in full - those ones are truncated.
I don't expect the MSM to post good news, unless it serves a government narrative.
@Joe
Arizona's legislators are fighting Arizona's election laws. That too, is embarrassing.
https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/public-health/suicides-fell-in-2020-early-cdc-data-shows.html
https://www.axios.com/suicide-decreased-in-2020-pandemmic-mental-health-26196eaf-a245-4d21-85eb-eeb864a24449.html
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778234
What's the 'gov't narrative' in this case?
The government narrative is that lock downs saved lives.
Therefore they will not report on evidence to the contrary.
From the JAMA article, we have this comment:
April 3, 2021
Death Certificates May Not Tell All - Suicide
Gary Ordog, MD, DABEM, DABMT | County of Los Angeles, Department of Health Services, (retired)
Thank you for your interesting article. Death certificates may not tell the entire story. I was surprised by the suicide rate reported to have a major decrease in 2020. It seems from most other reports that the suicide rate has increased since the pandemic began. This may be explained by the fact that the category of "Unintentional Injury" had a major increase at the same time, and the fact that this category includes drug overdoses. As there is often inadequate history in a fatal drug overdose case, many of these may be purposeful and so suicidal. This would explain the perceived increase in suicide rate since the current pandemic began. Perhaps further analysis of the data would elucidate this incongruity. Thank you again for your presentation. Gary Joseph Ordog, MD.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST: None Reported
Another letter is critical of relying on death certificates:
March 31, 2021
"Two Statisticians' View" of Leading Causes of Death
Elisabet Englund, Professor | Lund University Hospital, Lund, Sweden
Albeit of great interest, it is important to know that the given numbers come from death certificates.
All of us who work with / read the reports from autopsy pathologists know that the reality is different when actually examining the deceased.
A clinically unknown tumor is found in a large proportion of our cases, and so are unknown, potentially treatable infections. Clinically known/registered covid-19 patients die from various immediate causes. On top of that, a number of unknown covid-19 cases succumb - and this is shown only at autopsy with subsequent microscopical investigation.
Perhaps paving way for an exchange of knowledge,
Elisabet Englund, MD
Lund, Sweden
CONFLICT OF INTEREST: None Reported
Axios:
By the numbers: From 2019 to 2020, deaths by suicide declined by 5.6%, from 47,511 to 44,834, per the CDC. It was the third consecutive year of decline.
Trump re-election strategists may push that one.
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