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Coronavirus !!! Very Political Thread !!!

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TenaciousKory said:
I don't know anything about declaring cause of death, but I assume it's not a simple enterprise.

Isn't pneumonia a condition that arises from infections like influenza though? Not sure doctors are cooking the books here, but maybe it's more of a categorization problem.

For example, let's say your body is invaded by COVID, and in the course of this invasion your lungs get infected and inflame so you get put on a ventilator. After two weeks, the virus leaves your system and a week later you succumb to pneumonia. I don't think it's absurd for a doctor to declare pneumonia the cause of death. It's not like COVID is absolved of introducing or aggravating a pre-existing condition, but it's not the thing that caused death. That's pneumonia.
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The vast majority of the time the cause of death in some case as you suggest would be recorded as Covid-19. Or pneumonia due to Covid-19.


Now, I strongly suspect there were a lot of deaths recorded as merely “pneumonia” before we grasped the pandemic was upon us and before we were effectively testing for it in acute care settings. At this point there shouldn’t be many cases leading to death that aren’t correctly identified.
 
ConnorEl said:
The vast majority of the time the cause of death in some case as you suggest would be recorded as Covid-19. Or pneumonia due to Covid-19.


Now, I strongly suspect there were a lot of deaths recorded as merely “pneumonia” before we grasped the pandemic was upon us and before we were effectively testing for it in acute care settings. At this point there shouldn’t be many cases leading to death that aren’t correctly identified.
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Per https://www.medpagetoday.com/blogs/working-stiff/85925, which seems to be competently written.

Regardless of the availability of testing at their disparate death investigation agencies, medical examiners and coroners across the country are guided by the National Vital Statistics System (NVSS) guidelines for death certification. A death certificate has two sections where the doctor who investigated the case will write the cause of death. Part I is the underlying disease or injury that starts the lethal sequence of events. Part II is for any other underlying conditions that the decedent had that made the death more likely.

The NVSS guidelines state, "If COVID-19 played a role in the death, this condition should be specified on the death certificate. In many cases, it is likely that it will be the underlying cause of death, as it can lead to various life-threatening conditions, such as pneumonia and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). In some cases, survival from COVID-19 can be complicated by pre-existing chronic conditions, especially those that result in diminished lung capacity, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) or asthma. These medical conditions do not cause COVID-19, but can increase the risk of contracting a respiratory infection and death, so these conditions should be reported in Part II and not in Part I."

So, pathologists don't certify deaths as due to COVID-19 based solely on a positive nasopharyngeal swab. We get a clinical history of shortness of breath, chest pain, fever, cough. Yes, it is possible that someone could be an asymptomatic carrier and die of heart disease -- but in those cases we would certify the cause of death as heart disease and document the COVID-19 infection as a significant contributing condition, for several reasons.

Number one, COVID-19 can affect the heart (via myocarditis, pericarditis, or the formation of microthrombi). Number two, it's possible that the death may not have happened without the stress on medical resources caused by the pandemic. That's one of the reasons why the death toll in Italy is so bad -- their otherwise excellent healthcare system was grievously overloaded by a huge wave of COVID-19 patients. People who would've survived heart attacks during normal times died without medical intervention because they couldn't make it to the hospital or because the hospital couldn't treat them in time to save them. On some level it may be true that some natural-manner deaths being attributed to the virus could be seen as inflating the official COVID-19 numbers, but a failure to acknowledge and examine the pandemic's effect on the diagnosis and treatment of other natural deaths would also be problematic from a public health perspective.

To quote Dr. Ed Donoghue, a forensic pathology colleague at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, "No matter how these deaths are currently being attributed, after this pandemic terminates, an excellent approximation of the true fatality rate of COVID-19 deaths can be made by the calculation of the excess mortality for the period. This calculation was very helpful during the 1995 Chicago heat wave. Almost certainly, because of the scarcity of testing and other reasons, we will find that the number of COVID-19 deaths has been grossly underestimated." The final death toll is going to depend on multiple factors: the density of the population; availability of testing; genetic factors (both host and virus); the public health response; and the robustness of the healthcare system.
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I'm thinking the tweet referenced above pulled data for "Part I," not "Part II," which per this article is where you might list COVID. Not sure though. She doesn't make that clear.

Seems like the better data to look for is excess mortality, which the tweet makes pretty clear with the numbers. I still don't think this is some grand cover-up, but rather the outcome of the science of declaring death.
 
Like, there's a paper trail of death certificates that coroners have to certify.

Do we think they're the ones who are trying to mis-represent the COVID death count or is a politician just releasing false numbers despite records showing CoD as COVID? Aren't those numbers open to a FoIA request?
 
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I wasn’t commenting on the tweet.

Just your concern about how causes of death are documented...the vast majority of which are not determined by medical examiners , much less pathologists.

My response to you, however, is consistent with the methodology described for MEs. It’s not different for anyone else filling out death certificates.

Yes, looking at excess mortality will likely give some indication of additional deaths from Covid-19. As I suggested, we’ll see more of this likely in the earlier stages of the pandemic.


And yes, there’s no conspiracy among the medical community to suppress or exaggerate Covid deaths.
 
That's fair. I'm responding to the tweet and the posters who mirrored skepticism, I guess.
 
TenaciousKory said:
That's fair. I'm responding to the tweet and the posters who mirrored skepticism, I guess.
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Those numbers really worry me because there are only a few possible explanations, all of which are bad (because there are many covid deaths that are not reported):

- many died of covid before widespread testing was available
- many died of covid yet testing wasn’t done for some reason (maybe it’s still not easily available in some areas of Florida?)
- Florida is way underreporting covid deaths, which could be political, errors in reporting, etc
 
I'm a bit skeptical about the numbers in that tweet. It doesn't match some other data sources, and if there was THAT big a gap, it should show up as a bigger all cause mortality spike than what we are seeing in Florida. May just be a weird data reporting thing.
 
We had to call an ambulance for my wife’s grandfather due to COVID symptoms. He was placed on oxygen and diagnosed with pneumonia. The doctors were certain it was COVID and moved him to the COVID wing before his test results came back. He tested negative and was sent home a few days later.
 
tiltdeac said:
I'm a bit skeptical about the numbers in that tweet. It doesn't match some other data sources, and if there was THAT big a gap, it should show up as a bigger all cause mortality spike than what we are seeing in Florida. May just be a weird data reporting thing.
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So yeah, the numbers in that tweet are apples and oranges. It's an understandable mistake, because for some reason different CDC reports seem to classify pneumonia deaths differently for reasons I don't fully understand, and it leads to large discrepancies. The numbers from previous years in that tweet are real, they were pulled from the CDC wonder website looking at causes of death (link here https://wonder.cdc.gov/ucd-icd10.html). The problem is that these numbers don't match the CDC FluView pneumonia deaths (link here https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/fluview/mortality.html), which are much higher. If you use Fluview, the average pneumonia deaths over the last few years is between 3,700 and 3,900, not ~900. So there is still a discrepancy, but not nearly as large as the initial tweet made it seem. Further, those ~5400 "pneumonia" deaths (was around 5100 at the time of the tweet) on the current CDC Covid19 death count website (link here https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm) *includes* Covid19 deaths within pneumonia deaths.


TL/DR, there has been an increase in pneumonia deaths (and all cause mortality) in Florida this year, but it is explained by Covid19 pneumonia deaths, and seems to be relatively accurately reflected in the numbers reported thus far. I don't think we have any evidence at this point to suggest to any significant data manipulation.
 
PhDeac said:
I'd just like to see states report total deaths, so we can see how deaths increased over the last 3 months na how the last three months compare with past years.
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Surprised folks haven't moved to this already. Show total deaths vs. same period last year and use that delta as your est. covid deaths. Granted there could be other variables impacting deaths, but think safe to assume the vast majority of any change would be covid and best estimate for all states.

Heard of a 40 yo woman counseling @ a drug rehab center that had a heart attack while battling covid. Clearly a case that Covid triggered the heart attack, but not sure how that would be reported and above would eliminate the manipulation that states may try to play.
 
 
You mean states like TX, GA and FL that have faked their numbers? FL fired a woman for saying their stats were fake and showed how they are fake.
 
DeaconSig said:
Brad, for whom does Eric Strauss work?
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Strauss works (or worked) for ABC News. Feel free to post the other MSM outlets reporting or tweeting out this info.

Or is a scholar such as yourself confused over the meaning of the term 'more attention'?
 
Brad probably believes the vote totals in China, North Korea and Russia are real.
 
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