A look at the weekly CDC report on “COVID-19” deaths and what it really means
The real meaning of table 3 is that there is a very low chance of dying of COVID-19 without a co-morbidity, especially among young people.
This weekend, there was a great deal of social media discussion on a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) table that releases information on reported deaths that were or were presumed to be from the Wuhan coronavirus.
I would have shared with Legal Insurrection readers the tweet that got the discussion started, but the Masters of Twitter decided it did not meet their standards.
Therefore, I will begin by highlighting the source material for the discussion, the CDC’s Weekly Updates by Select Demographic and Geographic Characteristics – Provisional Death Counts for Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19). Specifically, Table 3: Conditions contributing to deaths involving coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), by age group, United States. Week ending 2/1/2020 to 8/22/2020.
The introduction to this table essentially summarizes the findings that 94% of the deaths by COVID-19 were also associated a potential fatal health condition (heart failure) or other significant co-morbidity factor (e.g., obesity). Therefore only 6% of the deaths reported for the virus are not connected with any other underling illness.
Table 3 shows the types of health conditions and contributing causes mentioned in conjunction with deaths involving coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). 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. The number of deaths with each condition or cause is shown for all deaths and by age groups.
The entire table is worth reviewing, for those who wish to have a better understanding of the realities of this pathogen. A portion is presented below, to offer a sense of the official data available on this subject.
And while it is tempting to say that the total number of coronavirus deaths is actually only 6% (or 9683) of the 161,392 being reported, the issue is much more complex than that.
To begin with, it doesn’t mean that the virus killed only about 9700 Americans. The data demonstrates that unless there is another underlying health condition, most people infected have very little chance of dying. This is especially true of young people who fall prey to the pathogen.
Yet, those people who had heart conditions, kidney problems, or other medical conditions who died might still be alive except that they were infected with COVID-19.
Since the inception of this pandemic, COVID-19 deaths have been lumped together into a category that included presumed deaths. What Table 3 means is that it is time to start combing through the number, determining what reality is, and conducting a serious and non-bureaucratic risk assessment. There is a proper balance that can be struck between protecting the vulnerable and returning to a normal life…and those who want to reopen the economy are not “grandma-killers” for wishing to do so.
Looking around the world, there are a few news tidbits that can place the real meaning of Table 3 into perspective.
Wuhan, the epicenter of this contagion, is reopening its schools:
As many as 2,842 educational institutions across the city are set to open their doors to almost 1.4 million students when the autumn semester gets underway, the local government announced on Friday. Wuhan University reopened on Monday.
…Schools have been ordered to stock up on disease control equipment and to carry out drills and training sessions to help prepare for new outbreaks. They must also restrict unnecessary mass gatherings, and submit daily reports to health authorities.
Foreign students and teachers who have not received notice from their school will not be allowed to return, it said.
This news follows the reports on the big Wuhan pool party this summer. These stories, paired with Table 3 revelations, begs the question as to why several of our states should remain under onerous shutdown policies.
Americans aren’t the only one chaffing under the draconian restrictions, either.
Demonstrators in several European cities Saturday rallied against restrictions that have been imposed since the COVID-19 outbreak.
Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets of Berlin to march against mask-wearing and social distancing rules. Police say they arrested about 300 protesters.
In London, demonstrators in Trafalgar Square rallied against what they said is the “medical tyranny” that has been placed on them by masks and distancing.
A few hundred protesters in Paris demonstrated against the capital’s mandatory mask-wearing mandate.
In conclusion: Table 3 does offer extremely valuable insight into the true health consequences of the Wuhan Coronavirus infections, but it should not be used to assert that the case fatality count is less than 10,000 in this country.
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Comments
Excellent analysis. The forces of moral panic are hard to resist.
The same is probably true of the annual flu. Most that die have other preexisting health problems. Also keep in mind that these rates and fatalities are with a shutdown like we never had before. Who knows what would happen if this was treated like the seasonal flu.
We’ll have a better idea after we go through the fall and winter again but hopefully we’ll have some treatment or vaccine before too long or it will just go away like the Spanish Flu did.
Sweden did not shut down and their curve looks like everyone else’s with similar rates of infection and death. From that it seems fair to say that not shutting down had no deleterious effect, or, conversely, that shutting down did not improve outcomes. The CDC, in one of its studies of potential pandemic responses, recommended against a shut down, stating that aside from being of limited benefit it would deleterious side effects.
To the Left those aren’t side effects, they are features.
These numbers are bring juked towards Wu-Flu in the same way that the numbers were juked away from AIDS, the first political disease, in the 80’s and 90’s.
Interestingly enough, the Swedes are seeing evidence of Herd Immunity at a 20% penetration level. That does not make ANY SENSE unless a lot of people ALREADY have immunity to Coronavirus from some other infection.
CV-19 was not the unique virus that Science believed it to be.
That a lot of people already have immunity was obvious from the beginning, since the ultimate case study was the cruise ship on which the virus had raged unchecked, with everyone living in everyone else’s lap, and an older population to boot, and yet only something like 20% of the passengers caught it.
Peru shut down about the same time places in the US did, and locked down hard. They just passed Belgium for the worst deaths/capita.
Sweden should be compared with countries which have similar morbidity and density attributes. If you compare Sweden with neighbouring Norway for example Sweden’s approach has not been a resounding success. I believe the lockdowns were necessary but the point where they created more harm then benefits has long since passed. COVID-19 efforts today should be concentrating on protecting the vulnerable.
Hi have no idea whether masks work. A study endorsed by the Ontario Civil Liberties Association, which is hardly a right wing organization concluded that they have no effect. That said, I have no problem with mask requirements as an alternative to lockdowns.
Comparing countries in terms of coronavirus deaths
Things to take into account:
* Population density
* % Black population (higher mortality)
* Average age
* Island (or nearly an island)
* Cultural norms of conformity
* Strong states vs. Federal govt.
* Vitamin D exposure
* HCQ use
* When they got first infection
* How open the borders
* How seniors are cared for
* Sex rates and number of partners
* Fake news effect
* Privacy limits
* Data credibility
* Lying about contact tracing
* Which “type” of coronavirus dominated
* Comorbidities
* Population distribution
* Transportation mechanisms
* Average BMI
And of course you have to wait until the end of the coronavirus everywhere to know how a country performed overall. Infections are likely to return to most places that have it under control.
Slight contrary opinion. The seasonal flu kills a lot more people that have no underlying conditions on a percentage basis.
This Covid virus has killed more people because it is a new virus and the overall immunity in the general population is as developed.
The IFR for covid is running approx 0.2% to 0.25%
where as the IFR for the seasonal flu is approx 0.4% to 0.6%
The lockdowns were implemented after the curve had already begun to bend downward, and thus had little effect if any in “flattening the curve.”
It’s almost like there was some sort of other purpose for the lockdowns, or something…
In Europe the excess deaths are now running under average ,which suggests to epidemiologist , that many of the excess deaths in March April.,May took people who on average would be passing now.
Virus gonna virus ,you can run but you.can’t hide for long.
Then, there’s my precious…HCQ…you takes it….you don’t gits it..cough…cough….Golum!!
Interesting that the panic and mask-wearing are showing no signs of abating. Americans seem to have really embraced submission to abusive and fraudulent authority.
“Americans seem to have really embraced submission to abusive and fraudulent authority.”
I havent been infected with the “Gospel of Science Submission”
currently riding bike with groups of 20-30 cyclists 4 days a week (interaction with 60+ different individuals weekly). In gym for 30-45 minutes 4 days a week interacting with 15+ different individuals. Wearing mask covering my chin, but not mouth or nose in public building. Overall interacting with 100-125 different individuals per week.
From a psychological and sociopolitical perspective, we are living through a case study in Dhimmi-crats’ effective use of Orwellian fear and control tactics.
What is scarier than the Dhimmi-crats’ gleeful and unabashed totalitarianism, is how many lemming-sheep automatons in the U.S. just blindly go along with whatever the Dhimmi-crat apparatchiks order them to do.
In ultra-Liberal Ann Arbor, Michigan, the predominantly young internet savy people wear masks on the street and many restaurants are shuttered. These folks get all there “news” from Twitter, FaceBook and other online sources which are spreading predominantly Leftist messages.
In a local, upper-middle class, Conservative city 10 miles down the expressway, the downtown is vibrant, maybe a quarter to a third of the people don masks on the street, parking is maxed out at lunch and dinner, all of the restaurants are overflowing onto the streets with diners waiting for the Whitmer-limited tables.
Covid is more prevalent in Ann Arbor. Go figure???
Texas has a mask mandate –
In the suburbs and city, people act like you should be shot for not wearing a mask
out in the rural areas, people act like you should be shot for wearing a mask
A local Karen just wrote a Six page letter to our Bishop and the Indiana State government complaining that people in our church were not social distancing or wearing masks. She is demanding that the State shut down our church. The Carmelite Priests are shocked. They have followed all of the State guidelines.
She is a complete Lunatic.
For 55k of the 160k dead (more than 1/3), one of the “contributing conditions” is respiratory failure.
I’m having trouble seeing how that can be fairly characterized as an unrelated underlying illness.
It feels like we’re arguing that someone didn’t really die from a car crash because it was the “contributing conditions” of a fractured skull and severe blood loss that combined to kill him.
Remember that there can be multiple codes for a single death. The covid deaths for respiratory diseases exceeds the total number of covid deaths in the table above. The people dying from respiratory failure could have happened to have covid but actually died from chronic lower respiratory disease without covid contributing at all. The same can be said for adult respiratory distress syndrome.
Current death rates in some countries are below normal, because people who would be dying now of other conditions died instead when COVID piled on months or weeks ago. You could say that COVID shifted the curve of these deaths into an earlier time period, shortening lives but not fully responsible for the deaths. These deaths should be categorized as “with” COVID not “from” COVID.
Any spike in deaths this year will likely be reflected in a trough next year because those individuals are no longer in the pool, so to speak. Five months ago i characterized Wu-flu as an infection which looks for individuals standing at the edge of a cliff, and it gives them a gentle shove.
The psychological effects from this will be both longer lasting and far more devastating. People now fear any sort of contact, and they wander around thinking that anyone who gets within 30 ft will kill them instantly. One neighbor has a sign to not pet their dog because they believe that the dog will then transmit Wu-flu from viri on its coat.
On a plus note, it is much easier to spot future fascists with their incessant mask shaming and control issues.
“…which looks for individuals standing at the edge of a cliff, and it gives them a gentle shove.”
I have described it in those terms from the very beginning, once we had learned it was the old that were dying.
The Flu has long been called the old man’s friend for that very reason.
You might need to know what a death certificate looks like to help understand this one. Doctors write that the cause of death is X arising from Y and Z with the presence of A, B and C.
So- Death was caused by respiratory failure resulting from pneumonia and diabetes, due to complications from hypertension, vascular disease and coronavirus.
The list can be as long or short as the doctor likes, it’s longer when you know the patient a long time, and covid springs to the top when the hospitalist or resident fills the thing out in the middle of the night and has never even seen the patient. No matter how you slice it, old and sick people die from their sicknesses, but with coronavirus in their systems.
Add in medicare reimbursement payments are higher when the cause of death include the china/election Virus.
You get what you pay for.
Thanks for this information. I have been commenting on the statistics for Michigan that I follow very closely on a daily basis. A frustrating factor for me is the recording of “deaths”. Normally, you wouldn’t put the word deaths in quotes because statistically dead is dead, right? Not with Comrade Whitmer at the helm in Lansing. She seems to think that the more deaths the better in some sinister plan to make Trump look bad.
She has three criteria for ruling somebody dead from Covid-19:
First, they die from Covid and it is the sole cause of death on the death certificate. Now we know that that number is roughly 6% of the total. This is something I have always wondered.
Second, somebody dies WITH a positive test for Covid but they have some other condition listed as a cause of death on their death certificate. This definition is very wide open and subjective.
Third, somebody tested positive, recovered and then dies anytime within 30 days of testing positive from any natural cause. Right now this is easy to track because the state site lists these as adjustments after vital records searches which means they go back 30 days comparing death certificates with positive tests. This currently accounts for roughly 50% of the deaths reported in Michigan.
Early on, people may have survived the virus but had damage to their respiratory system or heart and died subsequent, so that may have been valid. At this point, with massive testing and a corresponding increase in positive results (consistently 2% of tests) there is an increasing chance that in a 30 day pool of 20,000 survivors that you will have dozens of deaths from other natural causes totally unrelated to Covid. Even somebody who tests positive but is asymptomatic may die from natural causes and be included in Whitmer’s death count.
Bottom line, the U.S. death figure is completely bogus since the Whitmer method is repeated in Leftists states across the country.
Look at the table for excess deaths per state. That provides another dimension.
based on death certificates
I personally don’t trust death certificates.
My father died of lung cancer, but his death certificate says prostate cancer. His prostate cancer was in remission. The signing physician obviously didn’t know that he had recently been diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer (even though he had been left undiagnosed during a recent hospital stay) even though he had stopped smoking 30 years before.
My best friend died at age 69 of Colon Cancer. His death certificate lists Covid as the Cause. His son and brother argued with the Doctor over the cause of Death. The Doctor told them that the Board of Health does not allow Death Certificates to be altered.
The Doctor claimed they discovered Covid in my friend on the day that he died.
Interestingly, death certificates in certain (red) states are reviewed by the local (usually county) medical examiner. Some are sending them right back, telling the doctor and/or hospital that coronavirus needs to be moved to the back of the list.
Generally we die from our medical conditions- heart or kidney trouble, stroke, liver failure and so on. At the time of death we may or may not have an infection (bacterial or viral), an electrolyte imbalance or whatever. We die from heart failure with coronavirus in our system.
Will we ever see the revised death certificates? Might have to ask for ’em.
Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets of Berlin to march against mask-wearing
Marches protesting masks are all well and fine but not terribly relevant to anything important. Masks don’t destroy economies. Mandated shutdowns do. Much of American life is paralyzed because the blizzard of petty regulations we suffer through have frozen everything. Try fixing a huge pothole in your driveway. Oops, need a building permit. Fine, no biggie, go to town hall and get one. Oops, town hall is closed. Well, then the pothole stays because there’s nothing else to do about it. Nothing legal, anyway. So you either buy a 4×4 so you can get past the pothole, or you park in the street. And that does local traffic no good at all. But traffic is light because so many things are closed and many people aren’t driving to work, so there’s that.
There is a problem with younger people who are not at risk, infecting their elders who are at risk. I am not suggesting that lockdown should continue, just that young people need to avoid infecting and killing their at risk elders.
I think that is a big part of why blacks were dying at a high rate, that younger people were exposing people who should have been protected from exposure.
There are two specific reasons blacks are dying at higher rates.
1. More co-mordities. Higher rates of diabetes and obesity being the two biggest, and they’re intertwined.
2. Lower blood levels of Vitamin D.
According the the “gospel of Covid Science”
Young Asymptomatic people are just as infectious as older individuals with symptoms.
But its not true –
If you are asymptomatic – then you asymptomatic for a reason – which is that the body has control of the virus which means that the viral load is much lower which then means that the body is much less infectious. probably less than 5% as infectious.
but common sense and basic understanding of biology/science goes against the “Gospel of Covid Science”
The Former Director of Viral.Epidemiology at Bern University, Switzerland was interviewed by Ivor Cummins and said asymptomatic cases are cases where just bits of viral sluff are showing up .
If you have a true infection your body fights it and you have symptoms
The PCR tests have too many false tests to be using to influence public policy.
If you are interested in the covid fiasco check and read twitter Ivor Cummins ,Phil Kerpen ,Alex Berenson ,El Gato Malo.,Ethical Sceptic
You will be quite surprised at what American media is not telling you that Europeans are reporting.
Sweden did not shut down. When it was realized that there was a vulnerable population, Sweden took steps to protect those people. Kids stayed in school, working-age adults continued to go to work. Sweden’s numbers for cases and deaths is as good or better than several other European countries that shut down.
Now do some drawn out article about an obscure 4th Circuit Court ruling from 1887 which absolutely proves that Kamala Harris isn’t eligible to be vice president. Should be just as influential with voters as this piece.
Nothing like a dumbass marxist showing up trying to derail us from the truth.
Doesn’t work. Go back to marxist hoax perpetration school.
When an objective post-mortem analysis on the Chinese Wuhan virus is written up by rational people, it will be patently obvious that the vile Dhimmi-crats seized upon it — from Day One — as an opportunistic political weapon to attempt to destroy Trump, and, the despicable Dhimmi-crats were happy to gleefully fan flames of fear and hysteria, in order to impose totalitarian and economically destructive “lockdown” fiats, with utterly callous indifference to the economic and health consequences of millions of Americans.
THIS, along with the Dhimmi-crats’ contemptible enabling and endorsement of goose-stepping, jackbooted “Anti-fa” anarchist-thugs and “Black Lives Matter” Marxist goons, should be the narrative of this election campaign.
So if the worst case is more of us get infected faster and few of us die, we achieve herd immunity faster! Let my people go already! This Marxist farce has gone on too long!
Next time you see someone NOT wearing a mask, thank that person. People who are not wearing masks are helping to move the country towards herd immunity. People wearing masks are selfishly trying to prevent themselves from becoming ill, while hoping people other than themselves will move us toward herd immunity. Herd immunity can’t happen without people being infected, and (if you believe masks actually protect people) those not wearing masks are the only people taking on what is a necessary risk.
Not wearing a mask is the patriotic thing to do.
“Not wearing a mask is the patriotic thing to do.”
Bravo!
Masks don’t inhibit the transmission of a virus any better than a chain link fence keeps out mosquito’s.
“People wearing masks are selfishly trying to prevent themselves from becoming ill, …”
DGO, I have great respect for you in general, but this statement is not great.
First of all, it’s all about probability. There is absolutely no certainty available. It’s about shaving points off the probability you will either get infected or infect someone else.
Since masks are much more effective at keeping a person from infecting someone else than keeping them from getting infected themself, the idea that wearing a mask is selfish is harmfully false.
I hope you don’t think that it is virtuous for a person to promote herd immunity by intentionally making it more likely that they will infect someone else.
A better idea is that young people who do not have health issues which make them at-risk of death, and who do not live with people with such health issues, to be less careful when they are in gatherings with each other. For example: go to school (preferably, a private conservative school where they won’t be exposed to deadly intellectual viruses).
Such young people should wear masks around people whose at-risk-ness is not known (e.g. in grocery stores, etc.).
Leslie, another story that broke over the weekend was perhaps the testing process is generating positive results with insignificant amounts of the virus present. The NY Times reported that up to 90% have very little of the virus in their systems.
Could you provide some further insight?
I haven’t seen that information yet. Of course, any information minimizing pandemic panic is difficult to find.
Apparently, the testing protocol consists of a cyclical repetition that determines the presence of the virus. The potency depends on how many cycles are run on a sample to detect the virus, with higher potencies revealed after fewer cycles, and weaker presence, even just remnants, after more cycles. The number of cycles run on a sample is not included in the data, essentially equating all test results despite wide variation in viral load and contagion risk, and variation in cycle threshold standards, some labs routinely running more cycles than others.
From the NYT: The PCR test amplifies genetic matter from the virus in cycles; the fewer cycles required, the greater the amount of virus, or viral load, in the sample. The greater the viral load, the more likely the patient is to be contagious.
This number of amplification cycles needed to find the virus, called the cycle threshold, is never included in the results sent to doctors and coronavirus patients, although it could tell them how infectious the patients are.
I’m willing to expand the scope of the concept and say that *everything* you catch has a greater chance of putting you in the grave if you have a co-morbidity. This is why post-operative infections are such killers for one. If you apply a multiplier for each physical or psychological ailment (like depression/Alzheimers) on top of the common flu, odds are you’d get a similar line of death rates matched up against age. Because let’s be honest about this: If you have kidney disease, recovering from a heart attack, and cancer, any stray germ wandering by is a lethal threat.
As Rush Limbaugh’s situation demonstrates, chemo puts you at at serious risk from any infection that happens to come along.
Seeing that SCOTUS believes that everything that is manufactured, sold, and bought in this country is moving in interstate commerce, and therefore falls under the exclusive legislative jurisdiction of Congress, aren’t all state shut downs of said commerce unconstitutional infringements upon Congress’ authority over interstate commerce?
No, they’re not. It doesn’t work like that, and never has. Congress can regulate economic activity within a state that has a significant impact on interstate commerce, but the state where it happens can regulate it too unless Congress explicitly says it can’t.
There’s also a very low chance due to co-morbid obesity. Only 3.5% of COVID 19 deaths were co-morbid with obesity.
It’s mostly the elderly and the infirm, which doesn’t make it safe or nonsense, but it does fly in the face of media sensationalism.
Unless and until the actual cause of deaths recorded on covid related death certificates is actually verified, we have absolutely NO true idea of the number of covid related deaths which have occurred. Not only have we seen evidence that large numbers of people had their deaths classified as covid related, based solely upon post mortum tests for covid exposure, we hae cases where no laboratory test ever confirmed tht diagnosis. In Florida, they classified a person who died from trauma associated with a motorcycle accident as being a covid related death. Then we have the well documented practice of counting every person who tests positive to EXPOSURE to covid as being an active covid case, 98% of whom are apparently asymptomatic.
The evidence has mounted to the point that it cn be safely said that the medical community is either a total bunch of incompetent boobs, or that organize fraud is taking place here. Take your choice.
“or that”
AND
The great thing about virus death statistics is that they reveal the sin nature of man in both directions.
Hospitals can maximize their revenue by increasing reported COVID deaths.
Politicians can make themselves look more competent by decreasing reported COVID deaths.
It seems unlikely that there will be any consequences for these kinds of data tampering. Human nature is unleashed.
Maybe these two effects cancel each other somewhat, but I doubt it.
“What Table 3 means is that it is time to start combing through the number, determining what reality is, and conducting a serious and non-bureaucratic risk assessment.”
Our governor Warden Hair Gel stated last Friday that he will not be guided by the science. He is going to kill CA’s economy whatever it takes.
It’s really funny seeing people walking outside in Florida heat and humidity wearing a mask. Who is around to infect them? Their self-inflicted suffering is doubly funny because it was known from the beginning that covid-19 is killed by the kind of summer heat Florida gets. Knowing this naturally all the SE Florida counties sua sponte instituted new lockdowns and universal mask wearing at the beginning of summer.
“For 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned.”
I do NOT understand the confusion regarding this simple, black and white statement. This is their statement – IS IT A LIE ????
No, of course it isn’t a lie, but as Ms Eastman points out it doesn’t mean what various mindless right-wing sites are claiming it means.
Oh, and what are the “various mindless right-wing sites are claiming it means”, claiming?
Can we all stop listening to Fauci the fraud & Doctor House Brix? Fauci is the Bernie Madoff of Medicine.
lot of people seem to think that 6% means covid only killed 6% of all the deaths.
seeing as how covid itself cannot kill you death ONLY from covid is impossible. its like hiv, the virus itself does not kill you. covid hits respiratory system. cause of death would be that WITH covid.
what all this shows is we have a shitty data collection and reporting setup.
People have always trusted their doctors and relied on their local hospitals until now. Having spent my entire career in this field I can say that the propaganda has worked spectacularly well. Nurses, operating room teams, insurance companies and even some doctors have seemingly all abandoned science in favor of quivering under the bed for eternity. It doesn’t make sense, and it’s time the rest of us start doing something about it.
Read and understand the data. Double-check it with the CDC’s “flu view”, more easily understood graphs that show that the Emergency Room visit rate for flu-like symptoms is less than 1%. There’s virtually nobody sick in real life, NYC has 22 people in their hospital system of 60,000 beds (nyc.gov) this week. But for the screaming media and many murderous governors and blue city mayors, nobody really believes this stuff. Yet it is out there, our nation remains paralyzed.
What to do- get the message out. Cut-and-paste and transmit the data as much as you can. Even though it’s a disgusting exercise, put your comments behind every NYT and WAPO article, comment on twitter, facebook, wherever. Open as many accounts as you think you’ll need. Get your friends to help. The nimble can edit Wikipedia pages, though it’ll last about 2 minutes, and edit them in whatever foreign language you speak. Go out to protests, send calls and emails to your miserable state representatives and governors every single day. Get allies at work, church, businesses you patronize, etc.
This charade has cost us all dearly. Why there aren’t mobs in the street to bring State politicians down to earth is beyond me. I personally try to convince a dozen people every day, and then they go home and watch TV. This is not how the world is supposed to end. Come on!
The NYTimes article over the weekend (“Your Coronavirus Test Is Positive. Maybe It Shouldn’t Be.”) on PCR testing and the “cycle threshold” for testing is equally, if not more important. The bottom line in that piece, is that “cases” in the US are likely being over-counted by about 50%.
Basically, the PCR test for covid works by taking the DNA in a sample and multiplying it, then multiplying it again and again through a number of cycles. If it goes right, the DNA in the sample increases geometrically. Studies are showing that if covid can’t be detected at about 34-35 cycles, any additional cycles which are positive aren’t really picking up active covid, but traces of broken-down virus after the immune system gets done with it or traces too small to worry about.
Yet, many testing sites are going through 40 cycles and declaring the sample positive.
What I’ve found is that any statistic you look at breaks down the closer you look. Deaths, cases, hospitalization all are contaminated by bad data. Yet, our public health officials are making recommendations, and our politicians are making rules based on this nonsense data.
The Wuhan Flu is less contagious than Covid-based totalitarianism that has afflicted the world. Poli-Science versus Real-Science.
The thing is, the 6% doesn’t say that that percentage died from the virus, only that there was no other comorbidity present along with COVID.
That 6% might even be too high.