The comments to the original Pass me a Corona! post are closed. Additional comments on that topic should be posted below. I will start this post with PaV’s last comments to the prior post [i.e., everything that follows is PaV, not Barry].
Today the paywall for a Spectator USA article has been lifted. The article is by a retired pathologist who worked as a pathologist for the NHS in the UK, Dr. John Lee. I mentioned his article yesterday.
Every point he makes parallels arguments I’ve made here, though not so much the time period of death–though this, too, parallels a concern over “excess deaths.”
Here are some relevant comments:
The distinction between dying ‘with’ COVID-19 and dying ‘due to’ COVID-19 is not just splitting hairs. Consider some examples: an 87-year-old woman with dementia in a nursing home; a 79-year-old man with metastatic bladder cancer; a 29-year-old man with leukemia treated with chemotherapy; a 46-year-old woman with motor neurone disease for two years. All develop chest infections and die. All test positive for COVID-19. Yet all were vulnerable to death by chest infection from any infective cause (including the flu). COVID-19 might have been the final straw, but it has not caused their deaths.
Here’s a comment that might well be directed at the deaths we see coming out of Italy and Spain. Are these deaths due to a variety of causes but simply attributed, blindly, to the SARS-CoV-2 virus?
Next, what about the deaths? Many UK health spokespersons have been careful to repeatedly say that the numbers quoted in the UK indicate death with the virus, not death due to the virus — this matters. When giving evidence in parliament a few days ago, Prof. Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London said that he now expects fewer than 20,000 COVID-19 deaths in the UK but, importantly, two-thirds of these people would have died anyway. In other words, he suggests that the crude figure for ‘COVID deaths’ is three times higher than the number who have actually been killed by COVID-19. (Even the two-thirds figure is an estimate — it would not surprise me if the real proportion is higher.)
If we take Ferguson literally, does this mean that the actual number of deaths worldwide due to SARS-CoV-2 is not 35,000, but around 12,000? Will we ever know? The people responsible for finding this out are the same people who might have been gigantically wrong about their numbers. What would be their motivation to prove how incompetent they were?
It should be noted that there is no international standard method for attributing or recording causes of death. Also, normally, most respiratory deaths never have a specific infective cause recorded, whereas at the moment we can expect all positive COVID-19 results associated with a death to be recorded. Again, this is not splitting hairs. Imagine a population where more and more of us have already had COVID-19, and where every ill and dying patient is tested for the virus. The deaths apparently due to COVID-19, the COVID trajectory, will approach the overall death rate. It would appear that all deaths were caused by COVID-19 — would this be true? No. The severity of the epidemic would be indicated by how many extra deaths (above normal) there were overall.
Let me point out that this very problem is what has been going on now for over thirty years in the case of HIV. This is exactly how HIV/AIDS is defined. And Dr. John Lee says this is wrong. He’s a pathologist. So, Dr. Fauci, in charge of HIV/AIDS for over thirty years has been employing a definition for HIV/AIDS that is wrong, not true. Is it any wonder, then, that we are in this quandry?
Today, Fauci is quoted as saying that the number of deaths he expects from CoVid-19 is between 100,000 and 200,000. No way that is going to happen. Are the blind leading the blind?
Here’s a fresh perspective on numbers:
Let me finish with a couple of examples. Colleagues in Germany feel sure that their numbers are nearer the truth than most, because they had plenty of testing capacity ready when the pandemic struck. Currently the death rate is 0.8 percent in Germany. If we assume that about one-third of the recorded deaths are due to COVID-19 and that they have managed to test a third of all cases in the country who actually have the disease (a generous assumption), then the death rate for COVID-19 would be 0.08 percent. That might go up slightly, as a result of death lag. If we assume at present that this effect might be 25 percent (which seems generous), that would give an overall, and probably upper limit, of death rate of 0.1 percent, which is similar to seasonal flu.</blockquote. Let’s note that 0.08% is less than the mortality of seasonal flu. That’s how this entire thread started. Is the Deep State at work again?
This thread began on March 18th. Total number dead on that date: 150. Twelve days later–almost two weeks, the number is 2613. So, 2,470 people died in an almost two week period.
And how many have died of seasonal flu since Feb 28th? 4,000–as of March 19th.
We’re being had.