The best gauge of the pandemic’s impact is what statisticians call “excess mortality,” which compares the overall number of deaths with the total in previous years. That measure rose among older Americans because of Covid-19, but it rose at an even sharper rate among people aged 15 to 54, and most of those excess deaths were not attributed to the virus.
We attribute the excess mortality to the virus. Those excess deaths over the ones counted, are the ones we know who died of the virus, but never got tested. We always knew the Covid death count was low, because we always knew we could not possibly be counting all cases. Death certificates in uncounted cases never show Covid-19.
ReplyDeleteThe Covid deaths we have been missing, are not just the mostly older people dying at home, with no special need to be tested, just comforted until they pass. They include the young people, who never cared to get tested, buying into the idea that they could not be adversely effected by catching the virus. We have found out that this is more of a young person's virus than we ever thought. It was so easy to count nursing home patients, not so easy to count the younger set.
Deaths by suicide during this pandemic even off pretty much with the lives saved in auto accidents -- for the sake of significant numbers, and the numbers are now huge. Domestic murders do not make a dent in these comparisons. What's left for significant numbers, are deaths caused by the people catching the coronavirus.
Suicides in any year total less than 50,000, and we are already accounting for them. We know their numbers have risen. It's about 10,000 more than auto fatalities in any "normal" year, which gives us the phenomenon of excess suicides during the pandemic to approximate lives saved by people being off the road. Yes, it could easily be that yours and my lives were saved because we did not get hit by the cars that would have hit us, except the drivers were working from home those two days of 2020.
Doing some accounting here, to prove the numbers for sure, if we were to take the 125,000 excess deaths not counted, and instead of adding them to the Covid-19 mortality figure, add them instead to the suicide mortality figure, we would have gone from the 47,000 suicides we were expecting, to 172,000 suicides. That did not happen.
Here's how we would figure the numbers today. Using the John Hopkins count of 542,359 death certificates with Covid-19 on them as I write, a study in January says to multiply that number by 123%. This yields the more accurate number of deaths by Covid-19 to be 667,000. That's how we account for the excess mortality during this time period. Is it closer to 660K? maybe. Also, the factor of 23% is from a January study, which is down from late last summer.
Part of the problem is the media. They keep using the count, and would today refer to Covid as a virus that has taken the lives of 542,359 people. There is no good reason to under-report the number of deaths by coronavirus. It's as if the media does not want to face the full deadly impact of this pandemic, or thinks we do not.
Just because you die with Covid doesn’t mean you died of Covid. Any forensic pathologist will tell you that. We won’t know the facts until some years down the line. But you’re free to believe the official line if you choose. I don’t. I’m in my 80th year and I follow commonsense precautions. I do not intend to get the mRNA vaccine. John Tierney is one the best science writers around. I will take what he says seriously, and not dismiss it because it runs counter to the official view.
ReplyDeleteHi Frank,
ReplyDeleteWe're talking about excess mortality, which includes only the people we did not expect to die, where the only explanation is Covid-19.
The people who had Covid-19 and died from something else, would have died anyway, so they are not excess. They would not have had Covid-19 listed as a cause of death -- and if this was mistakenly done, it would reduced the difference between the count and the excess mortality. It all proves out the same in the accounting department.
As I write, about 680,000 excess people have died, and the only reasonable explanation is Covid-19. Forget the death count. No matter what, that's going to be low. There's been no nuclear bomb dropped on us, no asteroid, nothing else to explain it. Going into April of 2020, we had not been expecting that over 1 in 500 American residents would dead from Covid-19 a year later, but they are.