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COVID-19 as a cause of death — 29 Comments

  1. In an ideal world, record-keeping would be as accurate as possible. We do not live on that planet.

    I do note the Johns Hopkins daily tally shows only 20,000 as “recovered” in the USA.

    Prominent people no longer die of cancer and other fatal illnesses, based on obits. Instead they die of unspecified “complications” of their (inherently fatal, e.g. pancreatic) cancer or whatever. In fact the webmd site headline on McCain reads that he “died of brain cancer” but the text states he died of “brain cancer complications”.
    Said complications are merely symptoms and signs of the cause of death, the cancer itself. New language, obscurantist and bizarre. McCain did not die of headaches due to his cancer, did he? No. One does not die of a coma; one dies because of a brain cancer which led to coma.
    I expect we will soon read of people dying due to complications from the Wuhan virus.

  2. As I mentioned in another thread a couple days ago my dad had a cancerous brain tumor and eventually got pneumonia and died of that but his cause of death was listed as lung cancer which the doctor freely admitted they had no proof of but the type of brain tumor he had usually comes from lung cancer so they assumed it was there and since he had been a smoker they’d listed lung cancer.

    Like so much of the key information around this virus the numbers and facts are so incomplete and easily manipulated it just makes it more alarming that they are used to make such massive decisions.

  3. I’ve been seeing more about expat’s topic. Some doctor said that the problem that older people have with the virus is that their immune system gets more sensitive or more powerful (one or both?) with age. Then with COVID-19 they develop a cytokine storm or CRS, cytokine release syndrome, and the inflammation from that kills them.

  4. Cicero:

    I’ve already seen that “complications” designation in connection with COVID, and wondered about it.

  5. I’ve seen reports that the feds will cover covid expenses not covered by insurance. There’s a reason, especially to facilities which have run themselves ragged and perhaps even lost staff to the disease, to choose “covid” instead of pneumonia (which might justifiable), or instead of something further from the truth.

  6. In my travels I have come across one place where a digging implement is usually referred to as a spade and there appears to be a top-down campaign to fight the tendency toward obscurantism in word and deed; this even happens in most government pronouncements. This place is Singapore.

    It may be that Western Liberalism taken (more correctly Universalism) taken in the large simply cannot handle the truth and is in fact antithetical to it.

    A benign one party state dictatorship founded by one of the most intelligent (I didn’t say Minnesota Nice) politicians ever to live *must* keep its eye on the ball of verbal truthiness given forces of internal Entropy and the vehement hatred of our Best of the West.

    Back to the topic.

    I guess doctors tend to write most proximate cause of death on the Death Certificate in order to avoid legal complications. It’s kind of stupid in the case of someone who dies in a hospital and proximate cause of death is ‘Heart Failure’ when really you had a GBM IV and eventually lost swallow reflex and died when you dehydrated beyond some point and your circulating blood volume/viscosity became an issue. It sounds silly.

    But then in another part of the hospital, a rogue nurse is offing his/her patients as the opportunity presents itself. Or maybe not a total psychopath; perhaps she only does it when she’s on the rag. Or maybe only occasionally if doesn’t like some patient’s manner. These things happen. If I were a doctor, I’d be very keen to always write down proximate cause of death because in the back of my mind there’s always the Coroner (or jurisdictional equivalent) looking over my shoulder.

    We live in a fallen effed up world. All our statistics are like this. Fortunately there are techniques to tease truth out of data sets… but like anything involving the truth in the real world, it’s more a case of sidling up to it than bravely striding towards it. And by fits and bounds with reverses. Always the reverses.

    All we can do right now is look at gross death counts and visual cues like large numbers of people dying at home or outside hospitals. If see *those* as we did in leaked Wuhan videos then can believe our lying eyes.

  7. Neo, according to a couple articles I read today the numbers in NY are actually being under reported for people who die in their home. They are not counting the deaths as attributed to COVID-19 unless they can verify and confirm the cause. The number of deaths is so high in NYC that they are not verifying as much now.

    As of Monday afternoon, 2,738 New York City residents have died from ‘confirmed’ cases of COVID-19, according to the city Department of Health. That’s an average of 245 a day since the previous Monday.
    But another 200 city residents are now dying at home each day, compared to 20 to 25 such deaths before the pandemic, said Aja Worthy-Davis, a spokeswoman for the medical examiner’s office. And an untold number of them are unconfirmed.

    The FDNY says it responded to 2,192 cases of deaths at home between March 20th and April 5th, or about 130 a day, an almost 400 percent increase from the same time period last year.

    That number has been steadily increasing since March 30th, with 241 New Yorkers dying at home Sunday — more than the number of confirmed COVID-19 deaths that occurred citywide that day. On Monday night, the city reported 266 new deaths, suggesting the possibility of a 40% undercount of coronavirus-related deaths.

    https://gothamist.com/news/surge-number-new-yorkers-dying-home-officials-suspect-undercount-covid-19-related-deaths

  8. The “If the rest of the country winds up like New York” tracker for April 7, 2020, stands at a bit over 93 thousand dead nationwide.

    Mike

  9. Once again, cognitive dissonance is ruling the game.
    https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/04/07/white-house-coronavirus-task-force-briefing-500pm-et-livestream-11/comment-page-4/#comment-8043580

    (quoting from a Tweet)

    Liz Wheeler?
    @Liz_Wheeler

    Dr. Birx says anyone who dies with COVID-19 (regardless of other health issues) is counted as COVID death.

    That’s dumb.

    Worse, CDC doesn’t require TESTS to confirm COVID before it’s coded as COVID death. If symptoms are present… that’s enough. Crazy.

    And yet I’ve been reading stories about people who present the symptoms, but can’t get authorized to have a test so they can get treatment.

    Crazy is not even close.

  10. Overcounts may be balanced by undercounts in NYC.
    Gives an informative look at the abnormal number of 911 calls and cardiac arrests.
    https://gothamist.com/news/surge-number-new-yorkers-dying-home-officials-suspect-undercount-covid-19-related-deaths

    Statistics from the Fire Department, which runs EMS, confirm a staggering rise in deaths occurring at the scene before first responders can transport a person to a hospital for care.

    The FDNY says it responded to 2,192 cases of deaths at home between March 20th and April 5th, or about 130 a day, an almost 400 percent increase from the same time period last year. (In 2019, there were just 453 cardiac arrest calls where a patient died, according to the FDNY.)

    That number has been steadily increasing since March 30th, with 241 New Yorkers dying at home Sunday — more than the number of confirmed COVID-19 deaths that occurred citywide that day. On Monday night, the city reported 266 new deaths, suggesting the possibility of a 40% undercount of coronavirus-related deaths.

    A spokeswoman for Mayor Bill de Blasio did not return a request for comment about the difference between probable and confirmed COVID-19 deaths. But the discrepancy troubled public health authorities and local elected officials.

    “There’s no doubt we’re undercounting,” said City Councilman Mark Levine, who chairs the city’s Health Committee. “If the person had a confirmed test result before death then they were marked that was the cause of death on the death certificate. If someone did not have a confirmed test but it appears they had the symptoms, then OCME will flag them as a ‘possible’ [COVID death]. It’s unclear to me whether those are being counted in our total stats.”

    Dr. Irwin Redlener, the director of Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness, called the discrepancy “a subset of the whole testing fiasco.” He said the city should be testing dead bodies and reporting the results.

    “This difference between the [Medical Examiner] and the Health Department, that’s something that needs to be resolved urgently, that’s not okay,” Redlener said. “They have to be on the same page.”

    Redlener said the city should also be tracking other deaths that occur as collateral damage.

    “[People] may be dying because of reduced care for other non-COVID diseases” like diabetes, heart attacks or other chronic conditions, Redlener said. “Those to me, should be somehow tallied as we’re looking at the death toll of COVID.”

    Without in any way intending disrespect to the sadly departed and their families:
    The coding of any death with COVID as death by COVID lends itself to somewhat irreverent memes.

    https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EVCo-RPX0AUVTg4?format=jpg&name=900×900

  11. Mike:

    Keep that hobby horse rocking. Hoping for the worst outcome? Inconceivable, I know.

  12. Montage and AesopFan:

    First of all, I don’t think much of the Gothamist, a site with which I was previously unfamiliar until reading this article and the comments therein.

    But aside from that, I would add that apparently that report about deaths at home is based on this data. When I look at it, I see a few things right off the bat. The first is that those deaths at home are for both heart attacks and respiratory problems, but I don’t see any attempt to differentiate. So one thought that occurs to me is similar to this:

    One detective, who asked not to be identified, attributed the increase to new state guidelines advising EMT’s not to transport patients to the hospital if they do not respond to CPR or other on-site treatments.

    What this means is that deaths that would otherwise be recorded as occurring in the hospital are now recorded as having occurred at home. However, obviously it’s not all due to that, because there are also a lot more calls for EMTs than during the same period last year. But that could be (at least in part, or maybe mostly) because people who would otherwise go into the ER themselves because of their symptoms (for example, of heart attack), are avoiding going into the hospital at all, and are dying of heart disease at home. People are afraid to go the ER for fear of getting COVID.

    What’s more, there’s also this:

    Only people who die at home who are known to have a *positive coronavirus test* have the disease listed as the official cause on their death certificate.

    In other words, even if a person dies at home, if that person has had a positive COVID test, then that death is added to the COVID statistics. That information comes from a politician, not a health professional, so it’s hard to know what it’s based on.

    The article closes with this:

    NY1 reached out to the city’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner several times over the past week, but it has not respond to our request for comment.

    That was written today. Why no comment?

  13. It’s hard to follow the evidence if they — delete it because it was wrong.

    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/04/huge-covid-tracking-website-deletes-information-hospitalizations-icu-patients-tgp-reports-numbers-fall-bogus-model-predictions/

    By Jim Hoft Published April 7, 2020 at 9:13am
    After The Gateway Pundit reported on the hugely flawed hospitalization and ICU predictions on Monday the tracking website — “The Covid Tracking Project” — decided to remove ALL of their national hospitalization and ICU numbers.
    The COVID Tracking Twitter page announced the changes to their reporting on Monday night.

    The embedded Tweets, which I can’t copy and thoroughly detest, cite the problem of getting counts of different things from the states (some current hospitalizations, and some cumulative), which they were conflating on their charts.

  14. Neo – thanks for the response.

    The Gothamist post on home deaths (which I picked up from another site) didn’t seem rabid and the commenters were both left and right winged.
    Also (I went over and took another look), these two posts seem like normal (that is, unbiased) reportage, with bipartisan commentary (so they aren’t censoring one side).

    https://gothamist.com/news/rent-crisis-looming-state-lawmakers-want-pause-evictions-through-december

    https://gothamist.com/news/city-transparency-coronavirus-demographic-data

    When dealing with actual facts and figures, Gothamist seems to do okay, unlike the ideological hit piece on Samaritan’s Purse.
    (A sample of 4 is not statistically significant!)

    It’s pretty clear the writers & editors have certain triggers that bring out the bias.
    But —
    “Forget it, Jake, it’s Gotham town.”

  15. Amidst the legitimate concerns, cautious skepticism, and outright carping about the (as it seems now) overly ominous projections of the models, we* need to be sure that we don’t miss the essential point:
    We were all terribly afraid that those models were right, did everything we could to make their projections wrong, and apparently (hopefully) succeeded.

    Whether the models were faulty to begin with or not, there is a singularly important bottom line:

    We don’t want those “excess” hospital beds to be filled.

    Unused medical capacity is not some kind of “wasted effort” — if nothing else, we had a shake-down drill for some future pandemic when the projections won’t be wrong.

    We learned a lot of important lessons, which I won’t attempt to detail at 3 am my time, but foremost among them may be this one:

    In this era, the single greatest sources of danger to the health and safety of the public, world-wide, are the governmental agencies tasked specifically with protecting health and safety, and their political overlords bear a large share of the responsibility for that deficiency, beginning with the venal, malicious, and criminally negligent Chinese Communist Party, but definitely not stopping there.

    In particular:
    Anyone continuing to argue for socialism in America, complete or partial, is spitting in the wind.

    *”we” refers to the normal, mostly sane, populace, and not to TWANLOC, to use a phrase that has become increasingly, and obviously, applicable to a really frightening portion of Americans.

    If you aren’t inclined to look it up –
    Those Who Are No Longer Our Countrymen

    Proverb:
    https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=spit%20in%20the%20wind
    A futile act is “spitting in the wind.” So is a selfless but unheeding act that “boomerangs” or has dire consequences the doer hadn’t contemplated, an act that “did more harm than good.”

  16. Again, our prolific hostess leaves me many choices to post my update, so here it is on this thread which seems most relevant.

    Active cases still fit with the sigmoid function. An uptick yesterday in the new cases adjusted the sigmoid fit upward with the start of the flattening now out to Saturday/Sunday. I know it seems like I’m moving goalposts, but as we get closer to the curve bending, small changes in new cases affect the fit more than in the exponential region. I can predict the number of active cases when the curve really bends to be around 475,000. Serious cases has been linear for 3 days running, which if it continues, should also start to show up in the death rate.

    I would suggest for everyone to check Willis’ data on death rates for countries and states everyday. He does a good job so I don’t think I need to reproduce what he does. I’ll stay with active/serious case fitting.

    https://wattsupwiththat.com/daily-coronavirus-covid-19-data-graph-page/

  17. The ‘watt’s up with that’ blog leads to major spam and potential computer virus links. Be wary of the link… I tried to go there twice. Then tried via Google to find the blog. Nope. My computer does not like it.

  18. Montage:

    Use Brave browser and you will avoid the spam and other malware that got on to the “watt’s up with that” blog.

    I had the spam and such using Google Chrome browser yesterday but none with Brave and of course I use a separate antivirus and malware application.

  19. Never had a problem at all with WUWT. I use Firefox with Norton. Google being Google it’s well known they have a vendetta against “deniers”, soo…………….

  20. om – can outside hackers drop malware onto a blog? How does that work?
    I visited WUWT on Chrome regularly, until I switched to Brave & duck-duck-go for my New Year’s Resolution, and never had any problems then.

    (Just went over to look at the site and Brave blocked 11 cross-site trackers immediately.)

    “I use a separate antivirus and malware application” – which ones?

    BTW, if you haven’t read through Willis’s note at the beginning of the post, scroll down and get a look at the phone-booth style sample collection cubicles in South Korea.
    Brilliant.

  21. Me quoting me above: “In this era, the single greatest sources of danger to the health and safety of the public, world-wide, are the governmental agencies tasked specifically with protecting health and safety, and their political overlords bear a large share of the responsibility for that deficiency, beginning with the venal, malicious, and criminally negligent Chinese Communist Party, but definitely not stopping there.”

    ..and adding some chastisement of the intertwined media.

    https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/04/07/coronavirus-blowback-trump-to-withhold-funds-from-the-china-centric-un-who/

    Even CNN criticised the WHO’s abysmal China centric mishandling of the Coronavirus epidemic.

    Despite widespread criticism of their initial missteps, WHO shows no sign of getting their act together and focussing on their core mission; In the middle of a pandemic, a week ago a senior WHO advisor published an article exploring how to insert climate action into the global pandemic response.

    The WHO has been worse than useless; in my opinion they helped add credibility to China’s lies and false assurances, which lulled the world’s governments into believing the pandemic was not a major issue until it was too late.

    World health Organisation refuses to name staff who blocked early COVID-19 travel bans

    EXCLUSIVE: Digital Editor Jack Houghton [Sky News Australia]

    The World Health Organisation has refused to release the names of doctors who blocked an early bid to declare coronavirus a global health emergency.

    A Sky News Australia investigation has revealed a group of WHO doctors debated whether to declare the deadly coronavirus global emergency in late January but those who wanted to implement strict travel restrictions were outvoted and instead, the body released a glowing statement praising China, followed by a recommendation for countries not to ban travel to China.

    https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/04/02/senior-who-advisor-urges-a-climate-action-response-to-covid-19/

    A senior executive advisor to the United Nations World Health Organization, which is supposed to be coordinating the global response to the Chinese Coronavirus Pandemic, has just urged nations to embrace climate action as part of their response to the outbreak.

    https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/04/07/journalists-strategising-how-to-insert-climate-action-into-coronavirus-rescue-packages/

    If you are wondering why during the last week MSM journalists have pushed hard to tie climate action to the Chinese Coronavirus outbreak, the answer might lie in a webinar meeting which occurred on April 2nd.

    Hayes kicked off the webinar by arguing the $2 trillion economic relief package passed by Congress last month should have been geared toward transforming the industrial and energy sectors.

    After some discussion about the role reporters should play in covering both coronavirus and climate change, Holden asked about the possibility of poor perception from comparing the two events.

    “Is there a risk of environmental journalists’ reporting right now looking kind of opportunist and connecting these two crises or writing stories that are completely unrelated to this one? Is there a way to link these without being in bad taste?” she asked the panel.

    Hayhoe empathetically replied “Yes” and described how reporters should frame their stories.

  22. AesopFan:

    I don’t know the ins and outs of spammers and worse critters of the Interwebs but others here may be able to answer your query.

    I’ve been using eset NOD32 for years but don’t know if other apps are better.

    I agree with your assessment that Willis made. Our (Feds and most Governors) one size approach fits one case, every other case suffers. Just as every place in the US can’t be NYC. 🙂

  23. There is a piece from a Jacksonville FL TV station wailing about CV…

    https://www.news4jax.com/news/florida/2020/04/08/florida-coronavirus-cases-near-15500-as-deaths-top-300/

    Headline:
    Florida coronavirus cases near 15,700 as deaths top 300

    Ohhhhhh, NOOOOOes!?!?!?

    *sigh*

    Let’s put this in context… AGAIN.

    THE FLU, from Oct 1 through March 28 (180 days) killed from 24000 to 63000 people in this nation.

    Florida, with a population of 21.3 million out of 330 million is about 6.4% of the US population (note, there is another factor, age, which may be relevant, but that, if anything, skews florida’s expected results UP, making the below calculations conservative)

    So…

    (24000*0.065)/180 = 8.7 people PER DAY in FL
    (63000*0.065)/180 = 22.75 people PER DAY in FL

    So, not sure when you want to consider the “start” of this — seems to me that it began about 6 weeks ago, but let’s go with 4 weeks — a month. Call it 30 days.

    In 30 days, THE **FLU** — your everyday, garden-variety FLU — killed 260 to 682 Floridians.

    I ASSERT:

    THIS IS A BAD FLU.

    THAT’s ALL IT IS.

    https://web.archive.org/web/20200408090650/https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-estimates.htm

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