I don’t know anything about how death certificates are filled out. But that can be changed to suit. According to Dr. Andrew Kaufman M.D. COVID-19 Cases and Death Certificates are Being Manipulated.
He is a doctor, good one, but he is also a psychiatrist, which for me makes him a bit sus. After all they make up the science! So IDK what to think.
[link removed by moderator]
I removed the link. Please don’t post links to conspiracy theories and coronavirus misinformation here.
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Sorry, but he is a doctor and I am looking at what everyone says to try and make head or tail of it.
Unfortunately in reality it seems that you are learning a lot of bad misinformation about the pandemic, trying to “learn from both sides” but not having the medical or scientific background to weed through their misleading claims/sometimes straight up lies. You seem to have a remarkably high threshold for someone to try and prove to you real science but a very low threshold for buying the claims of people like Kaufman. I think this thread has run its course. If anyone wants to start a new thread on a new topic, feel free to do so.
Finally, if any more people want to use that CDC webpage from the original post to dismiss the severity of the virus, at least have the decency to include the statistic that in 93% of these deaths, COVID-19 is listed as the underlying cause on this other CDC webpage (see Table 1).
And if someone still can’t seem to comprehend otherwise, you can look at excess deaths.
1st) How many people die each day on average from all causes (accidents, heart disease, suicide, anything). These vary between 7000 deaths/day in summer to 8000 deaths/day in winter. This is “the people who would have died anyway.”
2nd) This can fluctuate from day to day, but does not go above a certain amount for too many days… unless something new and unaccounted for in previous years is killing people like crazy.
3rd) Here is the excess mortality for the United States… peaking twice at 17% above the normal deaths. That excess mortality is the burden of COVID-19 and it sucks. That’s thousands of extra people dying every day that wouldn’t have died otherwise!!!
4th) These are not “lockdown” deaths. How do we know? Look at the excess mortality of Florida. It was below baseline during “lockdown” but only shot up after they opened up and their cases skyrocketed! Or look at a state like Maine who is beating the pandemic like a boss. No COVID-19 = no excess deaths.
Graphs taken from: https://healthcostinstitute.org/…/daily-deaths-during…
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Thanks to the Mods for reopening this thread for an additional comment.
When I wrote my earlier replies I really wasn’t considering the source of the claim about hospitals exaggerating the prevalence of COVID deaths. This morning listening to a news story about QAnon I realized this is one of the conspiracies “Q” is promoting. Had I caught on to this earlier, I would have responded differently.
Debunking conspiracies is fine, but it’s never enough, as there are always more conspiracies lurking, and those promoting these ideas thrive on argument. We should go further than debunking and disavow the sources where these conspiracies appear.
Perhaps the questionable source was apparent from the topic title, but having seen similar posts on FB I assumed it was just more election-related noise. I wasn’t careful, and ended up debunking instead of disavowing. The lesson, I think, is that we should all be more careful about simply accepting claims, and look a little harder at who is making these claims and why.
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I never said that I “learn from both sides”. I see this way of stating my argument as a way to belittle me. I said it is important to look at what both sides are saying. Only by doing that can I do some independent research and come to some understanding of the true picture or at least some estimate, to evaluate it all for myself. You seem to think one should only look at one side as if there is only one side.
I have enough scientific background to be able to read a scientific paper and understand it.
As for your graphs, if you take in the last 30 years you will find that the numbers were higher in the 1990s with the H5N1 , which was also a new bird flu /influenza pandemic and there was no lockdowns. It makes me skeptical when I see that Dr. Fauci badly advised the President of the USA, Trump. He knew about HCQ in 2005. Chloroquine is a potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus infection and spread - PMC
So how many died owing to his advice. I have good reason to be skeptical.
Rats I thought this thread died.
You do realize these are the numbers we have in the United States with public health measures. What do you suppose things would be like if we just let the virus rip through our population?
What pandemic are you thinking about? H5N1 had about 900 confirmed cases and 400 deaths over the past 15 years…
Yes, chloroquine showed some effects in vero cells (an African green monkey kidney cell line) in 2005 against a closely related, but different virus in a cell culture. Do you think that it means it could have saved thousands of lives for a different virus, not in a cell culture, in different type of cells? There’s a reason why we tried randomized clinical trials for hydroxychloroquine but alas, they showed no effect when actually used in humans on SARS-COV-2.
None died thanks to Dr. Fauci. Stop listening to nonsense who has no idea what they are talking about.
I’m not sure you are demonstrating your ability to:
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A couple of other points worth considering:
- No human-to-human transmission of H5N1 has ever occurred. All cases have been attributed to transmission from birds (generally poultry).
- No cases have even occurred in the USA (so far as I can tell).
Please correct me if I have misspoken, Matthew.
There was no human-to-human transmission, hence no need for social distancing.
The number of deaths from COVID are about 2000 times higher than deaths from H5N1, and the COVID toll keeps rising.
Peace,
Chris
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Well maybe I got the virus wrong, but there was something there way back in the early 2000s where Obama was calling a state of emergency. About 10,000 or so died. I remember thinking this was an overreaction.
HCQ has been known and used successfully for more than 60 years. The paper I quoted was where Fauci should have at least known about it. It gets tested on animals first. So are you saying there were no clinical trials when it has been used to treat both malaria and a number of autoimmune diseases in millions of people? Of course there have been.
I am not listening to nonsense. I am hearing what everyone has to say to make my judgements. There were clinical trials hurriedly done in patients with covid 19 and what do you know it was found to be a dangerous drug. Please! This is nonsense. If you give the drug in high doses then of course there will be side effects and can be dangerous. This is true of many, many drugs. But the fact remains that it was then used by some doctors on covid 19 patients with a lot of success. There was a Cameroonian American doctor in Texas who used it. She said she had close to 400 patients with covid 19 and most recovered only one died. But she has been vilified as if she is the devil himself. Why?
Why is a drug known to be safe and successful, antibacterial and antiviral and an immune system modulator (not suppressor) suddenly a dangerous drug?
Multiple RCTs were done with various doses and in various circumstances (beginning of disease, after severe disease had taken hold, etc.).
1 person dying out of 400 going to a normal clinic (not the hospital) is probably not far off what you’d expect a normal clinic to see, even if not treating with anything. That’s why you use larger numbers and compare against placebo. She didn’t do that. The people that did do that found no statistical benefit, and in some cases worse outcomes.
Covid causes heart problems. One of the side effects of HCQ affects the heart. So maybe, just maybe, giving it to a patient experiencing heart problems might not be the smartest thing to do. Being safe for autoimmune disorders doesn’t equal safe for Covid patients. That’s why they did RCTs. What Fauci knew about HCQ in 2005 is irrelevant to a virus that didn’t exist until 2019.
Also, Obama wasn’t president in the early 2000’s. He was president from 2009-2016. He dealt with H1N1. They already had antivirals that would help with H1N1, and they had a vaccine ready in 6 months. 60 million people in the US got the disease from April 2009 to April 2010, and 12,000 people died in that one year’s time. Compare that to 7 million people that have gotten Covid-19 in the last 6 months, and 200,000 dead. Calling a state of emergency isn’t an overreaction. It is a legal process that allows rerouting of funds and personnel to other areas and allows temporary changes to laws. For example, when my state gets hit with tornadoes and schools have to close in some areas, the governor declares a state of emergency so that those school days don’t have to be made up, plus funds can be used to help with tornado damage. That’s not an overreaction, and neither was Obama’s action against H1N1.
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Can you please explain this statement.
Did 7 million people test positive for the coronavirus?
How many were asymptomatic?
How many had flu symptoms, which they are calling “mild symptoms”?
And how many had covid 19 or what they are calling “severe symptoms”?
There is a lot wrong right here. I don’t think that 7 million got covid 19.
Testing positive for the virus and/or antibodies doesn’t say you got sick and had no symptoms. A lot of people may have contacted the flu virus but don’t get sick because their immune system developed the antibodies and fought it off so that their health was unaffected.
Testing positive and simply having the flu for a week or two is also not covid 19.
Testing positive and getting very sick with massive inflammation is a whole different kettle of fish. A virus is not going to cause massive inflammation when it is destroyed in the process. There is much more going on that is not spoken about IMO.
Re-Obama. So a state of emergency only means some funds were allocated to help people?
Current data for the US is 7 million positive tests (that’s not antibody tests, but tests for active disease). Does it matter how many of those get symptoms, if 200,000 die? Compared to only 12,000 of the 60 million H1N1 positive tests?
And we don’t even have data on how many people are long haulers or how many have heart damage from asymptomatic or mild disease. I’m not aware of such things even being a problem for H1N1.
You can read the declaration here and follow up on the laws involved to learn what a state of emergency means:
And here is the one for Covid-19:
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Where do you get these bizarre ideas about immunology?
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I get these bizarre ideas about immunology from the medical literature. For example in this article:
The cytokine storm in COVID-19: An overview of the involvement of the chemokine/chemokine-receptor system - PMC which I may have posted earlier.
They say “Indeed from the physio-pathology point of view, the most interesting observation was the demonstration that viral titers seemed to paradoxically diminish during the most severe phase of the disease both in humans and in several animal models”. The most severe phase of the disease being the massive inflammation or cytokine storms.
And they go on to say " Data coming from patients’ series described during the 2003–2004 epidemics clearly suggested that complex alterations in the chemokine system were related to the outcome of SARS-CoV infection " So this is not a new problem.
In this article: Whole-Exome Sequencing Reveals Mutations in Genes Linked to Hemophagocytic Lymphohistiocytosis and Macrophage Activation Syndrome in Fatal Cases of H1N1 Influenza | The Journal of Infectious Diseases | Oxford Academic
It says: "Patients with life-threatening H1N1 influenza can manifest features of HLH/MAS, including hyperinflammation, pancytopenia, coagulopathy, and liver dysfunction; however, the frequency of these findings and their pathologic basis remains undefined. " Basically they don’t know what is causing the cytokine storms.
Their big problem is the notion that everything in biology has to be seen in the light of evolution. So they ask idiotic questions, IMO, such as what selective advantage is there in a virus creating a cytokine storm?
What they don’t want to accept is that there may be a reaction by the person, who is afraid of the effects of the virus. But when I say this I am accused of medical quackery. We see cytokine storms of one degree or another in autoimmune diseases and cancer treatment with immunotherapy drugs. In those cases there are no viruses or pathogens, so the argument is made that the immune system maybe malfunctioning. I don’t accept this.
From what I am seeing and what some virologists have said the “confirmed cases” are not about confirmed disease. There is a lot of confusion. If a person tested positive, symptoms or no symptoms, they are considered “a case”. And there is possible some 5% or more that are false positives.
If we were to test everyone with the regular flu viruses and whether sick or not call them all cases, then it would be far more than 7 million.
If a person’s immune system is working fully and destroys the virus without the person getting sick then they are no really “a case”. Only people, who get sick should be called “a case”.
A lot also depends on how many got tested in the earlier pandemics to the current one. It is entirely possible that around 100 million could have tested positive if they were tested.
Some of the differences with earlier viral diseases are here.
First, there is, of the 200,000 that died, around 40% of them were staffers and old people in nursing homes. They had legislation in place that prevented the nursing homes from refusing to take in the sick people from hospitals to recover in nursing homes. These people were infectious and the old people and staffers were vulnerable. So 80,000 deaths for bad management or what?
Then there is at least 30% could have been saved with HCQ. According to UK doctor John Campbell M.D. the WHO did a trial with covid 19 patients and gave them far higher doses that is recommended. Then they said the drug was dangerous. Why?
Belgium did a trial with low (as normally recommended ) doses and found it to be 30% effective for covid 19. 30% is around 60,000 people. HCQ is not a new drug. It has been used effectively and safely for 60+ years. It’s side effects are known and they occur with high doses.
Hydroxychloroquine, evidence of efficacy
Well duh. We tested just the sick and had 60 million. 60 > 7. Only 12,000 deaths from H1N1 in a year, but 200,000 from Covid-19 in 6 months. 200,000 > 12,000. Why didn’t fear kill more people with the flu? Oh, maybe because your hypothesis is utter nonsense.
I’m not going to entertain your HCQ video. That ship has sailed. It’s not the miracle drug the conspiracy theorists tell you it is. Multiple studies of different dosages, different timing/severity, different drugs with it have shown no effect in RCTs. Move on to things that might actually work.
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Nowhere in those papers does it say that a virus is not going to cause massive inflammation when it is destroyed in the process. It is the very process of destroying the virus that results in massive inflammation.
That phase is initiated by the virus.
Because there’s no evidence for it.
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