Hospitalized “With” or “Due” to Covid – Religio-Political Talk (RPT)

No one expressed it more clearly than Gregg Gonsalves, an associate professor at Yale University, epidemiologist, and AIDS activist. On March 23, Gonsalves tweeted: “As a friend of mine said this weekend: ‘There are no natural or social laws preventing us from remaking the economy for the next 18 months, the next years, or forever…. There are only political and cultural barriers, barriers we must overcome’….“

Similarly, Michael Hiltzik, a left-leaning columnist for the Los Angeles Times, wrote in May that the coronavirus could boost plans for universal basic income-government provided welfare payments for all. (In October, actress and liberal activist Jane Fonda would express an even blunter take: “I just think Covid is God’s gift to the left.”)

Alex Berenson, Pandemia: How Coronavirus Hysteria Took Over Our Government, Rights, and Lives (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2021), 113.

This will be an entirely ACE OF SPADES repost here. If you are not familiar with ACE’S website, I suggest you spend a week or two going over it. Books, gardening, tech, DIY projects, culture, and politics are the norm. Heavy on the politics please. But this post is an excellent 2023 follow-up to what we all know. What I was already pointing out in March of 2020:

UNITED STATES CORONA NUMBERS (ESTIMATED)

(There are probably 25 to 50 people who have the virus for every one person who is confirmed. [Dr. Makary BIO | YAHOO])

LOW # 3,607,000 (0.07% death rate with known deaths);
HIGH # 7,214,000 (0.03% death rate with known deaths).

(That 86% of infections went undocumented [SCIENCE | NEW YORK POST])

1,030,571 (0.25% death rate with known deaths).

UNITED STATES FLU NUMBERS (ESTIMATED)

56,000 (estimated high death rate) | 38,000,000 (estimated infections) = 0.14%

Or others also pointing out around the same time (like POWERLINE):

…Here are some details I got from a friend at UNC-Chapel Hill this morning: “Less than 373 hospitalized with COVID as of yesterday. More than 800 empty ICU beds in the state & more than 7000 empty hospital beds overall. Close to 2000 ventilators not in use. Approximately 40% of deaths in the state have been in nursing homes/retirement homes/prisons.”

Again, the likely cause is that the disease is not nearly as deadly as was originally expected. Thinking about that study showing that 13.7% of pregnant women presenting for delivery at NYC hospitals in March-early April tested positive for COVID-19 AT THE TIME of admission. Unless one thinks pregnant women are more likely to have been exposed to the virus than other people in the population, surely must mean that ~15% of NYC has been exposed. (Recall also that the NYC study was only of active infections not of antibodies.) If so, then 10,000 deaths out of 15% of NYC (1.2 million) points to an infection fatality rate around .008, very much in the ballpark of seasonal flu.

[….]

LIKEWISE, the trend holds true:

Ace of Spades!

This is by Leana Wen, former Planned Parenthood executive, who was among the biggest covid fear-mongers out there, before executing a face-turn to begin talking sense on the issue.

She notes that hospitals are now distinguishing between those who are in the hospital primarily for covid symptoms and those who merely have covid, but are in the hospital for other reasons.

And those in the hospital for covid are small minority of the total.

Counting anyone with covid as being in the hospital for covid hugely overpadded covid stats. And it’s important to know the real stats.

Unless our officials want to continue peddling false statistics to us, for some reason.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the United States is experiencing around 400 covid deaths every day. At that rate, there would be nearly 150,000 deaths a year.But are these Americans dying from covid or with covid?

Understanding this distinction is crucial to putting the continuing toll of the coronavirus into perspective. Determining how likely it is an infection will result in hospitalization or death helps people weigh their own risk. It also enables health officials to assess when vaccine effectiveness wanes and future rounds of boosters are needed.

Two infectious-disease experts I spoke with believe that the number of deaths attributed to covid is far greater than the actual number of people dying from covid. Robin Dretler, an attending physician at Emory Decatur Hospital and the former president of Georgia’s chapter of Infectious Diseases Society of America, estimates that at his hospital, 90 percent of patients diagnosed with covid are actually in the hospital for some other illness.

Emphasis added.

That doctor points out that gunshot victims who test positive for covid are still counted as “covid-related deaths” if they bleed out from the gunshots, which obviously is stupid AF.

Another doctor, Shira Doron, realized that a good proxy for determining if someone was in the hospital with covid or for covid is whether the patient is being administered the steroid dexamethasone, an anti-inflammatory given to covid patients to mitigate the low oxygen levels caused by that disease. Given that this drug is routinely given when someone is really suffering from serious, hospitalization-level covid, it’s a good way to separate the “withs” from the “fors.”

She says that while sometimes the fraction of patients who were in the hospital for covid reached as high as 30% of those diagnosed with covid, on many days, it fell as low as 10%.

If that is too abbreviated, she’s saying that in Denmark, they concluded in 2022 that in deaths that could be attributed to covid and another factor (“Covid+”), in 60% to 70% of the cases, covid was incidental — it was due to the other factor.

The Brownstone Institute details how many obvious non-covid-deaths were classified as covid deaths — are still being classified as covid deaths, in, “How to Die of Covid Accidentally.”

The CDC recently confirmed over 800 “accidental” Covid-19 deaths in 2021 for people under 60. These are deaths which obviously had little to do with Covid — but they logged them that way anyways. Here are 46 of those deaths from 2021 many just related to “falls” and others to events described.

There’s a big chart showing the “covid” deaths broken down into “covid” categories, such as covid falls, covid poisonings, covid motor vehicle accidents, etc.

Here are a few. First, some of the many, many Covid-related Falls.

A 32-year-old white male died in December from an unspecified fall that resulted in an unspecified injury of the head, mental and behavioral disorders related to alcohol use, convulsions, and a kidney tumor. He also had COVID-19.

A 57-year-old white male died in November from an “other fall on the same level” that resulted in a rib fracture, injury of the liver or gallbladder, malaise and fatigue, syncope and collapse, and COVID-19.

A 56-year-old white male died in March from an unspecified fall that resulted in cardiac arrest, stroke, other intracranial injuries, COVID-19, hypertension, and diabetes. He also had mental and behavioral disorders related to tobacco use.

A 56-year-old white male died in January from a fall on and from stairs and steps that resulted in an unspecified injury of the neck, pneumonia due to food and vomit, hypertension, diabetes, and hyperlipidemia. He also had COVID-19.

A 58-year-old white male died in February from a fall on and from stairs and steps that resulted in an unspecified injury of the head, intracranial injury, and accidental poisoning from alcohol. He also had hypertension and COVID-19.

A 56-year-old black male died in February from an unspecified fall that resulted in an unspecified injury of the head, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, congestive heart failure, hypertension, and a surgical operation. He also had COVID-19.

It’s those “falls with unspecified injury to the head” that read as especially covid-y to me.

Next, some covid-related suicides.

A 38-year-old white female died in April from suicide by intentional self-poisoning with antiallergic and antiemetic drugs, ethanol, and benzodiazepines. She also had COVID-19 and unspecified depressive and anxiety disorders.

A 31-year-old white male died in August from suicide by intentional self-harm with an unspecified means, resulting in intracranial injury. He also had COVID-19, pneumonia, and unspecified drug poisoning.

A 27-year-old white male died in January from suicide by intentional self-harm with a firearm, resulting in open wounds to the head. He also had COVID-19, severe depression, and unspecified anxiety disorder.

A 22-year-old white male died in September from suicide by handgun discharge, resulting in open wound to the head. He also had COVID-19, unspecified anxiety and depression, and unspecified mental disorder.

A 55-year-old white male died in August from suicide by firearm discharge, resulting in open wounds to the head. He also had COVID-19, unspecified depression, diabetes, obesity, and hypertension.

Finally, a covid-related murder:

A 19-year-old black male died in February as a result of homicide by handgun discharge, resulting in multiple open wounds. He also had COVID-19 and unspecified infectious diseases.

END OF ACE’S POST

Of course I have noted waaay back similar items [by date] in my “Funny Covid-19 Numbers By Date (Why Many Are Skeptical)”

[….]

And as states are going over death certificates, they are dropping by at least 25% in deaths by Covid-19. And some independent groups are helping “catch” the inflated number, like Pennsylvania’s “Wolf administration was caught this week adding up to 269 fake deaths to the state totals on Tuesday” (CITADELPOLITICS). Or this short example (PJ-MEDIA)

On Thursday, the Washington State Department of Health (DOH) confirmed a report by the Freedom Foundation that they have included those who tested positive for COVID-19 but died of other causes, including gunshot injuries, in their coronavirus death totals. This calls into serious question the state’s calculations of residents who have actually died of the CCP pandemic.
Last week, after it was reported that, like Washington, Colorado was counting deaths of all COVID-19 positive persons regardless of cause (which had resulted in the inclusion of deaths from alcohol poisoning), the Colorado Department of Health and Environment began to differentiate between deaths “among people with COVID-19” and “deaths due to COVID-19.”

Just one more of the many examples I could share is the New York Times getting 40% wrong of their “died from Covid-19 under 30-years old” front page news story. Mmmm, no, they didn’t die of Covid. As states figure this out, the inflated counts (like when Colorado did this — fell by 25%: lots more on this below).

The WASHINGTON EXAMINER notes the disparity in what has been a change in how deaths are categorized as guidelines by the CDC:

Two Minnesota state lawmakers are calling for an audit of death certificates that were attributed to the coronavirus, saying COVID-19 deaths could have been inflated by 40%.

State Rep. Mary Franson and state Sen. Scott Jensen released a video last week revealing that after reviewing thousands of death certificates in the state, 40% did not have COVID-19 as the underlying cause of death.

“I have other examples where COVID isn’t the underlying cause of death, where we have a fall. Another example is we have a freshwater drowning. We have dementia. We have a stroke and multiorgan failure,” Franson said in the video.

She added that in one case, a person who was ejected from a car was “counted as a COVID death” because the virus was in his system.

Franson said she and a team reviewed 2,800 “death certificate data points” and found that about 800 of them did not have the virus as the underlying cause of death.

Jensen pointed out that he gained attention back in April when he criticized the Minnesota Department of Health for following federal guides on recording coronavirus deaths.

“I sort of got myself in hot water way back in April when I made the comment that I was, as a physician, being encouraged to do death certificates differently with COVID-19 than with other disease entities,” Jensen said.

“For 17 years, the CDC document that guides us as physicians to do death certificates has stood, but this year, we were told, through the Department of Health and the CDC, that the rules were changing if COVID-19 was involved.”

“If it’s COVID-19, we’re told now it doesn’t matter if it was actually the diagnosis that caused death. If someone had it, they died of it,” he said…

[….]

I do have much more over the years.

Here are but a few examples: