Latest FB nonsense. "Only 6% died of COVID-19"

Istm that this argument cuts both ways. Granted that C-19 could have been the major factor in cases listed as “respiratory failure”. But was it really the major factor in the many tens of thousands marked “Cardiac arrest”, “Renal failure”, “Other injury, intentional/unintentional”, “Sepsis”, etc.? I do not know how widespread the practice has been, but we know for certain that, e.g., in Washington there were gunshot victims whose death was put down as C-19. I personally know an Amish family who went to the funeral of an Amish boy who had died by drowning – they allege that the hospital offered the boy’s family money to put C-19 on the death certificate, the family declined, but the hospital did it anyway. Granted, this is an unconfirmed anecdote – but it so happens that I know and trust the family that is saying this. There do seem to be monetary incentives for marking deaths as C-19. And if there is any correlation between how these cases are handled here and in England, there may be some additional cause for concern. The Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine alleges:

it seems that PHE regularly looks for people on the NHS database who have ever tested positive, and simply checks to see if they are still alive or not. PHE does not appear to consider how long ago the COVID test result was, nor whether the person has been successfully treated in hospital and discharged to the community. Anyone who has tested COVID positive but subsequently died at a later date of any cause will be included on the PHE COVID death figures.

By this PHE definition, no one with COVID in England is allowed to ever recover from their illness. A patient who has tested positive, but successfully treated and discharged from hospital, will still be counted as a COVID death even if they had a heart attack or were run over by a bus three months later.
( Why no-one can ever recover from COVID-19 in England – a statistical anomaly)

I do not dismiss C-19 as a “hoax”. I know people who have had it and their experience has ranged from light to serious. My concern is that this data set on mortality is corrupted in a number of ways. How badly I don’t think we can say, but I think there’s adequate evidence to raise the question without being dismissed merely as a cranky conspiracy theorist. Thoughts?

No one dies “from” the flu. Flu death rates should be “0” every year because the flu virus isn’t what kills them. They die of pneumonia and other related causes. COVID causes many complications for people with underlying conditions. A diabetic may suddenly experience circulatory problems and ultimately die of a heart attack. People’s blood pressure will spike into stroke levels and then crater for no apparent reason. Then there are issues with blood clots/stroke and, of course, pneumonia. All of them are real people who really died. Reclassifying those deaths as something other than COVID-related won’t bring them back to their loved ones.

I’d seen a CDC figure on average number of flu infections per year cited in several articles, but a few months ago the link was suddenly dead (https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/disease/). A little more digging turned up this jewel from an assistant secretary at HHS:

CDC — INFLUENZA DEATHS: REQUEST FOR CORRECTION (RFC)

The CDC website states what has become commonly accepted and widely reported in the lay and scientific press: annually “about 36 000 [Americans] die from flu” (www.cdc.gov/flu/about/disease.htm) and “influenza/pneumonia” is the seventh leading cause of death in the United States (www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/lcod.htm). But why are flu and pneumonia bundled together? Is the relationship so strong or unique to warrant characterizing them as a single cause of death? David Rosenthal, director of Harvard University Health Services, said, “People don’t necessarily die, per se, of the [flu] virus—the viraemia. What they die of is a secondary pneumonia. So many of these pneumonias are not viral pneumonias but secondary [pneumonias].”

Basically, the Trump Administration didn’t like the numbers, so they are doing to the CDC (and FDA) what they did to the EPA. We’re in trouble, folks.

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kick 'em all out

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I provided another CDC link to their statement that 93% of such deaths have COVID-19 listed as the primary cause of death. While you certainly can have cases where someone just so happen to die when they had COVID-19, these people are the vast minority of cases and COVID-19 is the underlying cause.

We also can look at excess mortality and find that well over 200,000 people die more than normal… in places where COVID-19 is spiking. For example, New York City had a lot of excess deaths back in March and April but has basically none now.

These are my other thoughts of how we can know we aren’t severely overestimates deaths. Plus there’s lots of other effects of the disease like LONG-COVID in otherwise healthy people:

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Yes, because the patient’s health crisis was precipitated by COVID. Death certificates always list “contributing factors” to the person’s death.

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Using this same logic, cancer has never killed a single person. Instead, all those people really died from a lack of oxygen to the brain.

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Bullets don’t kill people - it’s lead poisoning that does them in. :wink:

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Excess Death is the term that is missing here (unless I skimmed too quickly?). People are dying to COVID-19 sooner than they might have died otherwise.

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It would be interesting to do a Bayesian analysis of this whole thing. Of those with these underlying conditions, how many die correlated with flu, and how many die from other precipitating causes? Seems we are only looking at one half of the Bayesian factor here.

Excess deaths seems like a gold standard, but there are a whole lot of confounding variables without controls surroubding the pandemic. It is difficult to draw a straight line from covi-19 to excess death counts.

Unfortunately, we have only a vague idea of how many deaths are caused by the flu.

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I think researchers should be forthright about how little certainty we have. That would eliminate easy targets for the fake news patrol.

Another explanation of how death certificates work:

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As I am well aware … Excess deaths is more useful as a historical measure, not in the moment.

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My new favorite thread on this topic:

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Love the profile pic.

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I know @Christy posted this in good faith as a “science” point, but we need to recognize that “science” is being hijacked and politicized and weaponized by both sides. Most science statements I hear in the media bear little or no resemblance to a balanced perspective of the actual data.

And there’s enough bashing of one side in this thread to make me decide to post. To fail to realize that both sides are complicit and culpable, to only engage with one echo chamber or the other, you become part of the problem.

To those of you who are devout here, I have one recommendation: pray “deliver us from evil.” It’s everywhere right now!

Are you saying that truth doesn’t matter if “good people” on a certain side are the ones doing the lying?

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What-about-isms aren’t a very good way of approaching this problem, either. Most of the people I see here are committed to understanding the science and communicating it as accurately as possible.

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Enough bashing of people who misunderstand death certificates, who propogate lies about COVID-19 and put more people at risk to catch, spread and die from the virus including the President of the United States?

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