It has been admitted that, as Dr. Deborah Birx said in a recent press conference, "...in this country, we've taken a very liberal approach to mortality." She went on to say, "There are other countries that if you had a pre-existing condition and let's say the virus caused you to go to the ICU and then have a heart or kidney problem. Some countries are recording that as a heart issue or a kidney issue and not a COVID-19 death." She then concludes that, "The intent is right now if someone dies with COVID-19, we're counting that as a COVID-19 death."
Notice the difference. If you died with COVID-19, they are counting it as you died from COVID-19. And, I will remind you, that even with the "very liberal" accounting of COVID-19 deaths, it is still far lower than pneumonia deaths (42,560 in the first 12 weeks of 2020 alone).
But there is also more to this story. Dr. Birx talks about the virus "causing" you to go to the ICU, but there are reports coming out, like this one on Fox News from Dr. Scott Jensen, that, unlike at other times, doctors are being encouraged to count deaths of nearly any kind as a COVID-19 death if they have been confirmed to have have the virus. Dr. Jensen said, "If I have a patient died a month ago, had fever, a cough, and died after three days and had maybe been an elderly, fragile individual, and there happened to be an influenza epidemic around our community, I wouldn't put influenza on the death certificate, and I've never been encouraged to do so. I would put, probably, respiratory arrest would be the top line and the underlying cause disease would be pneumonia, and in the contributing factors I might well put emphysema or congestive heart failure. But, I would never put influenza down as the underlying cause of death, and yet, that's what we're being asked to do here."
Much has also been made of the bad time that Italy has had with the virus. In fact the US and other countries have been using numbers from Italy to model the possible spread and lethality of the epidemic.
But, is Italy the proper case to base a model on. It has been widely discussed that Italy's demographics skew significantly toward the older population, which are the most vulnerable to COVID-19. As reported in The Telegraph:
According to Prof Walter Ricciardi, scientific adviser to Italy’s minister of health, the country’s mortality rate is far higher due to demographics - the nation has the second oldest population worldwide - and the manner in which hospitals record deaths.
“The age of our patients in hospitals is substantially older - the median is 67, while in China it was 46,” Prof Ricciardi says. “So essentially the age distribution of our patients is squeezed to an older age and this is substantial in increasing the lethality.”But, beyond the demographic issues with Italy, we now learn that Italy too used a very liberal accounting for COVID-19 deaths. From The Telegraph again:
“The way in which we code deaths in our country is very generous in the sense that all the people who die in hospitals with the coronavirus are deemed to be dying of the coronavirus.
“On re-evaluation by the National Institute of Health, only 12 per cent of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus, while 88 per cent of patients who have died have at least one pre-morbidity - many had two or three,” he says.Read it again! "only 12 per cent of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus." 12 percent...TWELVE...the number of deaths times 0.12. Okay, that's significant!
So, what would the chart look like if the US over-reporting was in the same range as Italy? And remember what Dr. Birx said above, "very liberal." It would look something like this:
This is much more in-line with what some experts on epidemics were predicting.
The point I will make is that if we are to take such drastic steps...steps that are causing massive unemployment like we have never seen...we have to be more sure of the numbers. The devastation to the economy in the long-term could likely be much worse than the short-term affects of the coronavirus pandemic.
I am not going offer conjecture on all the reasons for over-estimating the numbers so massively. I also admit that some number of the cases where COVID-19 was not the cause of death, it may have been a contributing factor. The point I will make is that if we are to take such drastic steps...steps that are causing massive unemployment like we have never seen...we have to be more sure of the numbers. The devastation to the economy in the long-term could likely be much worse than the short-term affects of the coronavirus pandemic.
These are the kinds of results you get when you allow "government experts," of any kind, to make extremely consequential decisions for the whole country. Remember that their initial models that caused the panic to begin with...the ones that launched the police-state lock-downs...were that 2 million Americans could die. They have continued to back down those predictions, but their prescription has remained the same, and has gotten worse as more and more jurisdictions have inflicted stricter "social distancing" mandates on their citizens.
Fauci, Birix and the other CDC experts are all working from mathematical modeling that, as Fauci admits "are only as good as the assumptions you put into the model." But, while he claims to not pay too close attention to the models, these were the numbers that have been reported that caused panic and were, at least in the early days, used to justify the lock-downs.
But these experts are only expert in one, narrow area. They are not economists...they don't have any real concern for economic realities. Their concern has always been expressed about "overwhelming the healthcare system." In addition, the experts in charge...the ones who have the current levers of power...are allowed to ignore other, contradicting expert opinions, like Stanford University epidemiologist John Ioannidis and others. Some say that "flattening the curve" only prolongs the problem, and therefore the economic affects, by delaying the acquisition of "herd immunity" in the population. But, they only allow voices that agree with their assessments, even as they are shown to be wrong.
A sample epidemic curve, with and without social distancing.
Image credit: Johannes Kalliauer/ CC BY-SA 4.0)
Notice in the diagram above, "flattening the curve" may help the health care system, but it drags the over-all problem out over a much longer time horizon. This will, therefore cause longer-term negative effects to the economy. The longer a business is kept from pursuing revenue, the less likely it will be able to survive...the higher the number of long-term unemployed and financial damage. But, as you can see from the diagram, the total number of deaths is likely to be nearly the same.
While we know that the defense of the "flattening the curve" approach is to guard against overwhelming the healthcare system, have we really critically questioned the assumptions. Yes, some areas are being hit hard, New York City, in particular, but nothing like what was predicted. Remember, Governor Anthony Cuomo's exasperated question "What am I going to do with four hundred ventilators when I need thirty thousands?" Well, it hasn't turned out that they have needed anywhere near that number. But even if it had been worse than it is, we have the vast majority of the rest of the country with excess healthcare sitting idle with employees being furloughed.. Surely we could have made this work in the short term to get through this faster.
When asked about when we can expect to open the country back up, Dr. Fauci said. "I think reopening it is not going to be like a light switch that you switch on or off. Because, if you look at throughout the country, it's a large country and the outbreaks are really quite different, depending on where you are." This seems to make some sense, but the question I have is why did we have to switch the country off all at one time? As Fauci continued, "New York, New Jersey area is very different from now what we've seen in Washington State and in California, in which there was the threat of a real big spike, but it really didn't occur and is at that low level."
In fact, it is true that areas in the country are very different. The following chart shows the number of deaths (reportedly) caused by COVID-19 per State as of April 10th.
So, from this chart, we have to ask, why do we have nearly the entire country on lock-down? The answer is simple...FEAR. Fear started and perpetuated by the so-called experts, based on faulty mathematical modeling. Fear of the disease...but also fear that politicians of all stripes might be held responsible for not doing enough. Fear that was not tempered in any way by the opinion of other "experts" in the same or other areas. I've laid out what I think some of the other causes have been in a previous post.
The arguments we keep seeing are based on a false dichotomy. There are not only two choices: Total shut-down...OR...we're all going to die! There are many, many choices in between. As we get through this current scare and come out the other side, I hope, and believe that the economy will rebound. There is no-doubt pent up demand that is being held back by the lock-down. But, how many of your favorite businesses will survive it? How many people will be out of jobs? The longer this goes, the worse those effects will be. Let's start reversing this lock-down anywhere we can...NOW.
We cannot retain our liberty if we uncritically accept anything that comes from so-called government experts.
