The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has just released a tranche of new data about the coronavirus.
Far and away the most interesting statement is this one:
For 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned. For deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average, there were 2.6 additional conditions or causes per death.
Now, per the same document, we’ve had 161,392 deaths WITH coronavirus up to August 22nd, meaning that the virus was detected either while they were alive or at autopsy.
But only 6% of those people actually died of the coronavirus alone … meaning that we’ve had about 9,680 people who died of Coronavirus-19.
And that is a nationwide death rate of 0.003% … and a before and after difference of 17 times. (see note- AW)
As for the rest of the fatalities, on average they had two or three “co-morbidities”, other diseases that might or might not have killed them.
Note from Anthony: Willis provided the base article, I made some enhancements to the title, the body, and made a bar chart. And to clear up some confusion about the initial title number (177% which was wrong, my bad), it is now 161392/9860 = 16.67 or ~17 times.
The only problem with your ‘bad coding’ analysis is that if all of the ‘fell off ladder’ deaths went to zero
and the number of ‘hit by invisible meteorites’ went up to the ladder deaths number
you would be forgiven for thinking that one was being labelled as the other.
So its not ‘Bad Coding’ . It’s redirected coding
for example, in the UK. Flu deaths have fallen, Covid deaths have risen. But Covid deaths plus flu deaths equal what flu deaths used to be.
The social distancing and lockdown measures introduced for Covid have the effect of reducing flu transmission. There’s also probably been an increase in flu vaccinations (definitely the case in Australia). So a decrease in flu deaths is not surprising. But is the rise in Covid really just due to those people who would have died of flu now dying of Covid? Social distancing and sanitation (hand-washing etc) rules should have a similar effect on both diseases, and where they break down (nursing homes, some workplaces, parties) there should be a parallel increase seen in both flu and Covid, all other things being equal. All other things are not equal of course, with no vaccine for Covid and no residual population immunity (flu doesn’t really have ‘herd’ immunity because the virus changes, but we have all had some prior exposure). As others have pointed out here, it’s still too early and the data is too messy to understand what is really happening.
How COVID deaths are counter
Beware! They could be trying to lure us out of our shelters so they can seize our food!
Where can I find the “6%” quote? I didn’t see a summary
First of all, this flu disease causes a lot of suffering which is too often ignored. There are not only two categories — infectef people who died and infected peopke who did not die. A friend in her 60s was extremely sick for thtee weeks. So sick at one point she condidered suicide. She received 24 hour a day care at home from her son, a doctor, who did not trust his hospital early in the pandemic. She, a recently retired emergency room doctor, survived, but her son got COVID from her, although with less serious symptoms. Both of them were healthy people with no pre-existing medical confitions. Very few infected people will die from COVID, but many will suffer more than they would have sufferef with a typical seasonal flu
Anyone who thinks only 9600 people died from COVID and the reports of 160000 are completely wrong is an incompetent conspiracy theorist and has no idea how flu deaths are estimated … and have always been estimated.
This pandemic is still in progress so there ‘are no experts yet. Especially the author of this article.
Influenza deaths are estimated with computer models, not a list of actual people who died. Most doctors will tell you they never lost a patient to influenza, or maybe one or two. They believe official numbers are double to quadruple actual flu deaths.
One problem is too often asduming deaths from pneumonia are *flu deaths*. There are many causes of pneumonia and sometimes it is bacterial pneumonia, not a virus. And when a cancer patient gets the flu and dies, the cause of death will most likely be listed as the flu, not cancer and the flu. That’s just the way things things are done.
Deaths attributed to the flu have always been guessed using computer models and doctors believe much too high versus reality.
Most Ameticans over age 40 have one or more medical conditions. Obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes are very common. Many people don’t know they have diabetes or high blood pressure for a year or two, or even five years. For some people a fatal heart attack is the first symptom of heart disease — I lost a friend that way — in his mid 50’s with no symptoms.
Some eople who died of COVID may have had other medical conditions NOT known before they got the virus. Health status not known does not mean they wete perfectly healthy.
A lot of old people with other medical conditions got a COVID infection and died earlier than they would have died without the flu virus. To imply those deaths are not really flu deaths is wrong, and ridiculous.
Influenza in general kills mainly old people but sometimes children too. Children seem to br avoiding this flu. Whether they can spread the disease while having no symptoms is unknown, but my guess is the risk is very low, or more families with children would all be infected.
At least 44,000 excess deaths in the U.S. have not been related to COVID-19 at all. In my view, this is a direct result of the government lockdowns. My analysis here:
https://www.virtualwright.com/The_Wright_Stuff/COVID19/Entries/2020/8/13_Death_By_Government.html
Wright
An excellent link.
The deaths caused by partial lockdowns, unemployment and avoiding hospitals and doctors gets far too little attention. I’m not sure I”d blame the government for all of this because the mass media has deliberately tried to scare people, medical non-experts wild guessed a huge disaster would happen and people avoided doctors by choice, not because the government told them to. As a libertarian since 1973 I hate anything official and don’t mind blaming the state governments, even if not 100 percent true.
27 million Americans were getting state and federal unemployment benefits as of last Thursday for an implied unemployment rate of about 17 petcent, NOT the official BLS numbet.
That huge unemployment rate has to have health effects.
Good point. The media thrive on disasters and this is great for their ratings. The media and government are a big cabal. And then there are the people like Bill Gates who wants to vaccinate literally the entire planet for COVID-19. Ultimately with the goal of reducing the population. His own words.
Amazing isn’t it, how using different criteria to capture the data can drastically affect what the data indicates? What we have is a complete failure of understanding how to collect data!
So when the hospital a mile from here had refrigerated trucks in the parking lot in April because they didn’t have enough places to put all the corpses, presumably almost all those people would have died in the next year or so anyway, but they just happened to get nudged off the edge in the same few weeks by a nearly harmless little virus. So now that we know this everyone can let down their guard and take off the face masks and party on just like they did in spring break in Florida and New Orleans. Let’s just hope it’s not a politically motivated whitewash. The lady down the street didn’t look near death to me.
Was she put on a ventilator? Was she at Elmhurst?
https://news.usc.edu/168987/antibody-testing-results-covid-19-infections-los-angeles-county/
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article242260406.html
New York State is conducting an antibody testing survey to develop a baseline infection rate. The preliminary results of phase two show 14.9 percent of the population have COVID-19 antibodies. The preliminary results of phase one of the state’s antibody testing survey released on April 23rd showed 13.9 percent of the population have COVID-19 antibodies.
The above is from this! https://coronavirus.health.ny.gov/covid-19-testing
Conclusion, instead of 6,000,000 cases (based on active virus testing) there have probably been 60,000,000 cases. 10,000/6,000,000 = 0.0167% mortality. WHICH MEANS THAT THE COMMON COLD IS MORE DANGEROUS THAN COVID 19.
Hugo son
Your conclusion that the common cold is more dangerous than COVID is embarassing.
Max,
Interesting about the the vaunted NY testing program. The article says,
You couldn’t make a quote like that up.
Your comment raises the question of the point of RT-PCR testing. If herd immunity isn’t reached until a population surpasses some threshhold of 70 – 80% exposure (or whatever), New York isn’t even close. So why are we bothering with a strategy to reach herd immunity at any cost, or paying billions of dollars for an exquisitely sensitive test that doesn’t give us results for weeks? Ninety-five percent of the “positives” being delivered by the “gold standard” RT-PCR (naso-pharyngeal) tests are of people who are already recovered and thus already knew they were sick, or else are no longer infectious. Viral shedding takes place over several weeks, but we’re only infectious for one week. But the supremely sensitive PCR tests detect even the post-infection “fragments” of the virus and declare people as positive even during their convalescence. As a public health tool such testing is worthless.
It has been demonstrated that even though we may be sick for months, we are only infectious for about one week. During that time, know it or not, we are spreaders. What is needed are cheap, fast, at-home saliva tests, taken like an at-home pregnancy test, with a paper strip that changes color, giving results in a matter of minutes. Spreaders can be identified at points of entry to various institutions in minutes. But better yet, everybody could purchase a multi-test kit from Costco, enough for, say, 14 daily tests, and test ourselves before we go to work or school. Knowing we are infectious (even asymptomatically), we take responsibility for our actions and stay home (or go to one of those clinics that so desperately wants to take care of us.)
These kind of tests should be subsidized heavily by the government so that anyone can purchase them for $1 apiece. It’s this kind of screening frequency that makes any testing program work, not the “gold standard” laboratory tests whose results you don’t see for two or three weeks. A massive government investment should be made to manufacture and distribute a simple spit test – taken in the privacy of your home, low-cost, results in 15 minutes. Because it can be self-administered daily people could take back their own lives from these intrusive testing methods that require you to be screened online and report your status to the authorities. Such antigen tests exist in small labs, and have been shown to be near 100% accurate at detecting the high viral loads of CT 32 and lower (the lower the cycle number the higher the viral load). Claims that they are not accurate are NOT ACCURATE.
Antigen tests were shut down in February by FDA because they aren’t “sensitive” enough to catch viral infections on the upswing, or on the long tail of convalescence. Trump is apparently challenging the FDA’s imperial stance on their control of laboratory developed tests (LDTs). If he can get them to promote a handfull of the best rapid-result paper spit tests for use strictly at home (without any reagents or machine readers or online screening BS), maybe some financiers will get these tests to market.
People here should watch:
Oh. That was bold of me.
Excellent
According to the CDC, during the 2018-2019 flu season, there were an estimated 34,157 deaths from influenza. For comparison purposes is there any way of telling for how many of these deaths flu “was the only cause mentioned?”
The Province of Alberta has released detailed stats all along. The corrected CDC numbers are very similar, ie 75% 3 or more co-morbidities, another 15% 2 or more. Average age of death 83.
My one and only covid post does discuss this issue. A well known anomaly in cause of death determination in the age of covid where, as in climate science, the word “could” comes in handy.
https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/04/03/11187/
Too much is being made of this statistic. COVID-19 is the most honest cause of death to report for most oc these cases. Therr probably is identifiable exaggeration of the numbers, but it is percentages, not a factor of 17. Please don’t exaggerate in ways that allow enemies of wuwt to dismiss wuwt.
I have questions, Willis.
Out of 161K deaths, the biggest non-respiratory/non-circulatory comorbidity was diabetes with 26k deaths.
How many people died of diabetes in the same timeframe last year?
How many people died of diabetes without Wuhan Plaguein the same timeframe this year?
How many excess deaths was that over diabetes’ normal toll?
The biggest respiratory comorbidity was flu and pneumonia, and the second biggest was repiratory failure.
Are pneumonia and respiratory failure separate diseases, or are they symptoms of the Wuhan Plague?
Likewise, how many of the circulatory hypertensive diseases were symptoms of Wuhan Plague, not separate diseases?
Until we have data on *excess* deaths, the 6% figure is propaganda.
There is a huge point to be made about those comorbidities. They might be something huge like lung cancer or COPD that might well kill the patient tomorrow in the absence of the Wuhan flu. However, they might also be something less significant like obesity or diabetes, which probably wouldnt have killed the patient the next day, or week, or year, in the absence of the Wuhan flu. A finer grained and more detailed analysis might be able to narrow it down further for a particular case, but all we can say from this data is that there is now a floor. There was always an upper estimate for deaths of COVID, but now there is a floor as well to acknowledge that some unknown number of people died “with, but not of” COVID. No amount of parsing of this CDC data is likely to narrow that window between a floor of 9,000 (or so) and a ceiling of 180,000.
What if Covid was a vaccination? Then vague previous suspected medical events, or imaginary events would be used to excuse the vaccine. When a kid becomes very sick just after a vaccination, there is always a s’pert there to find a “disease” that the kid had and that was never diagnosed, so the vaccine is innocent.
Are we going to judge Covid more severely than vaccinations? That would make zero sense.
Checkmate, Big Pharma.
I may start a list of the worst posts on WUWT.
This video is far better than almost everything above, explains what’s really going on, and won’t be a waste of time.
https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v=4326710077404117&ref=watch_permalink
Ugh, ZDogg. That guy is irritating as hell.
Then watch Dr. Seheult explain how he fills out death certificates of Covid-19 victims.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TECf3xSFbU
This was a world wide effort to keep the greatest President in American history from getting re-elected. Only history will prove me right. It’s because the world knows it’s going to get less of our tax dollars !!!!
In these discussions one should keep clear the reason for the quarantines and face masks and distances. It may be that in the end COVID is another flu, BUT the RAPIDITY OF ITS GROWTH, as seen in the example of Lombardy in Italy, does in a few weeks what a flu season does, (even with the vaccine widely distributed), accelerates the death rate of the old and with comorbidities. And there is no vaccine yet.
The whole medical objective was to keep the health system working. With a health system flooded a lot more unnecessary deaths, unrelated to COVID would happen: accidents, heart attacks etc, and people with some years of life expectancy would die in a few days. Also I do not think an economy would survive the death of the health system in the region.
Also keep in mind that we all die. The rate of death depends on many things, though to the individual and family it makes a great difference if one dies now or in one year. A good study would be a comparison per month of deaths in the same region/country over a few years. Are there peaks in the COVID season?
Also it would be interesting to study the economy of Lombardy during the coffin in trucks time. Was it working?
Lombardy in Italy has/had a large Chinese population in the tens of thousands, many of whom flew to Wuhan China then back to Italy after the new year. They then proceeded to infect all and sundry in Lombardy before the medical system was aware of what was going on. It is possible that Italy received several thousand infected air passengers from China all at varying stages of infection. This would result in a sudden ramp up of the disease in Lombardy.
This is what was going to happen in the US except (to howls of derision) Trump shut down flights into the USA from China.
Excess deaths seems a lot like temperature anomalies. Doesn’t really mean anything.
The common element here is government.
We are arguing government produced numbers,which were collated using a changed metric from previous years.
Making year to year comparison very difficult.
Numbers in which financial incentives exist to call a death covid related.
The common element is incompetence,butt covering and political motives..While these numbers may be “Good enough for Government”,they will be useless for gleaning any accurate picture of what has happened over the last 5 months.
The only consistent factor in this panicked shutdown of trade and commerce,has been government.
Who have not missed an hours pay as they grind the producers into oblivion.
Even more damning,these bureaucrats of the Bureau of Public Safety had one job,for which they get paid to stand ready for,should the need ever arise,well the need arose and they rose to the occasion,by falling flat on their faces.
The official response of Public safety has been epic,contradictory outbursts,outright lying and misinformation.
And now we are trying to understand what has happened,but the government statistics are useless.
So why do we keep these “outstanding experts” on our payroll?
The German Society for Pathology published a pre-print press release of a total of 156 autopsies of people dying with SARS-CoV-2:
https://www.pathologie.de/?eID=downloadtool&uid=2019
Their conclusion was that 86% died from and not just with virus.
The average age was 70y which is 10y less than the normal life expectancy.
Highest co-morbidity was cardiovascular preconditions.
Whoever might be concerned about the low number, well, the researchers are as well and demand more funding to do more autopsies. Autopsies are in fact an underfunded and endangered art so it’s not the just the usual screaming for more money.
“Flatten the curve” did seem logical when initially the Wuhan Virus first caught everyone’s intention. Panic perpetuation of original tactics now that our vulnerabilities are recognized seems misguided.
Because, in addition to this CDC report on the virus’ low direct mortality feature, another recent report shows those testing positive (you got it) provide no context to how much you got. With the corrolary being there is proportionally less asymptomatic transmission risk.
Although pushing 70 & being in the Wuhan Virus’ wheelhouse kicking range I believe wrecking the economy by precautionary dictats was/is unfair to younger citizens.
42% of those who died had eighter flu or pneumonia in addition to Covid.
The logical conclusion is that we would gain a lot if everybody took flu and pneumonic vaccine.
/Jan
I practiced workers’ compensation law in Ohio for 17 years. Multiple causation of death was a quite common issue. (For instance, someone shoveling snow at work with pre-existing heart disease has a myocardial infarction or dies. Employer argues death due to pre-existing condition. Employee argues you take the employee’s pre-existing condition as you find him and that the infarction is work-related) From my experience in dealing with many people with pre-existing conditions to which an industrial accident or exposure was added, my speculative guess is that most people would consider 60,000 to 100,000 of the US deaths to be substantially caused by Covid in that these 60,000 to 100,000 people might be expected to live another 3 years.
This is just a speculative off the cuff analysis based on my past experience. However, as opposed to many people here, I routinely dealt with multiple causation in the workers’ compensation setting. Obviously, a deep dive into the statistics would be much better than my off the cuff guess.
Interesting perspective. Thanks JD.
And the $64,000 question. Will the MSM now give us this info or will they simply down-play the data since it doesn’t fit the agenda much like they do regarding that “existential threat” with the 98% consensus?