SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus (COVID-19)

health: dr. jeff faust, a harvard med school instructor, said that if flu deaths were counted like covid deaths, the worst recent flu season evidently killed 15,650 people in the US.

 

The reason for 'stay at home' is to reduce the impulse, the peak infection rate, that overloads the medical care facilities. The area under the curve, the total cases and deaths remains the same but are not 'left edge loaded' causing the hospitals, clinics, and staff to collapse.

Sometimes called 'pay me now or pay me later.' The risks for the Swedes is technical and procedure advances may reduce the area under the curve. Hindsight, the Swedes are left with more deaths than others who used "isolation" that bought time for others to work the problem.

Bob Wilson

 

Just helping @bisco Here is the full article.
Comparing COVID-19 Deaths to Flu Deaths Is like Comparing Apples to Oranges - Scientific American Blog Network April 28, 2020

The point is that CDC's flu death count is a very inflated figure based on estimation. If you just count the number of confirmed cases of flu caused death, the COVID-19 killed between 9.5 and 44 times more people than seasonal flu.

Edit: However, this opinion article published in Scientific American blog site a few days ago came from the same Dr. who earlier stated "that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is not nearly as deadly as is currently feared" in the early March issue of Slate.
What a change in opinion in just two month period on the front line of emergency care for COVID-19 patients in Boston.
COVID-19's mortality rate isn't as high as we think. Slate -MARCH 04, 2020

 

Coronavirus Has Killed More Americans Than the Vietnam War

Yeah....I hate it when people make moronic comparisons........

 

A snippet for those who don't have time to read the article:

"In the last six flu seasons, the CDC’s reported number of actual confirmed flu deaths—that is, counting flu deaths the way we are currently counting deaths from the coronavirus—has ranged from 3,448 to 15,620, ..."

I wouldn't call the CDC's larger flu death count "inflated". "Estimated" is a better term. The majority of flu-associated deaths don't actually list influenza on the death certificates, but rather list the more immediate causes of death that are driven or worsened by influenza.

Similar models and retrospective estimations have not yet been applied to Covid-19.

 

"Scientific American Blog Network April 28, 2020"

"Observations I Opinion"

"The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not reflect the views and opinions of Brigham and Women’s Hospital or Harvard Medical School."

 

I guess the real question that needs to be addressed, how many have actually died from Covid 19 in the USA? About the only way to figure that out is to look at the average death rate month by month over say a 2 yr period, then deduct that from the same months death rate this yr and that will give you the increase in death rate that could be attributed to Covid 19.
The fact that a lot get killed in motor vehicle accidents and shooting incidents that haven't happened with people in lock down would still affect the count.
By not attributing those deaths that were avoided due to the lock down to deaths by other means which could be due suicides increasing and possibly accidental poisonings by following silly advice from some sectors including the various social networks could/should be still attributed to Covid 19? A point that could be argued either way, would these deaths have been avoided if the shutdown hadn't happened or the virus outbreak occurring, or would the number have remained about the same because of the number who would have died in motor vehicle accidents etc?

The issue is, are all the Covid 19 deaths being reported, or only those that could afford to seek medical advice, were then confirmed to actually have Covid19 and then later die as a result?
The UK were only counting those that died in hospital, not those that died in care housing such as aged care and disability housing, jails? mental hospitals? died at home never having been tested?

T1 Terry

 

Read this piece written by another doctor on another .gov sector, U.S. Department of Health & Human Services.

CDC — Influenza Deaths: Request for Correction (RFC) | ASPE An excerpt from the article, the last paragraph reads:

Vaccination" occurs when "medical experts and public health authorities publicly...state concern and alarm (and predict dire outcomes)—and urge influenza vaccination" (http://www.ama-assn.org/ama1/pub/upload/mm/36/2004_flu_nowak.pdf). Another step entails "continued reports...that influenza is causing severe illness and/or affecting lots of people, helping foster the perception that many people are susceptible to a bad case of influenza." Preceding the summit, demand had been low early into the 2003 flu season. "At that point, the manufacturers were telling us that they weren't receiving a lot of orders for vaccine for use in November or even December," recalled Dr Nowak on National Public Radio. "It really did look like we needed to do something to encourage people to get a flu shot." If flu is in fact not a major cause of death, this public relations approach is surely exaggerated. Moreover, by arbitrarily linking flu with pneumonia, current data are statistically biased. Until corrected and until unbiased statistics are developed, the chances for sound discussion and public health policy are limited.​

If the increased flu death number "estimation" by the CDC is publically disseminated due to the underlying motive to promote flu vaccine, I would call it "inflated". Ironically, if that is the case, the CDC might have botched it even worse than the initial release of the COVID-19 test kit fiasco. CDC's good intention to urge public to get flu vaccination might have facilitated the current dire situation with COVID-19 pandemic in the US.

Edit: After doing a cursory search, I found that the contributor of the piece I linked above, Dr. Kenneth Stoller turned out to be a very vocal opponent of vaccination. I suppose, he has a different underlying motive to discredit CDD flu studies. Use your own judgment and media literacy to read into the validity of his argument. San Francisco investigates anti-vaccine doctor

 

Found a bit odd from the article:

I decided to call colleagues around the country who work in other emergency departments and in intensive care units to ask a simple question: how many patients could they remember dying from the flu? Most of the physicians I surveyed couldn’t remember a single one over their careers. Some said they recalled a few. All of them seemed to be having the same light bulb moment I had already experienced: For too long, we have blindly accepted a statistic that does not match our clinical experience.
​

His anecdotal position is likely influenced from being an ER physician seeing only the front end of advanced cases, though his reports on querying ICU physicians seem dubious.

As a hospitalist internal medicine physician for the last 9-12 years (first 3 post-residency years mostly clinic based), my experiences have been significantly different. I admit these patients from the ER and take care of them until discharge. As such I am also responsible for completing their death certificates. I have directly cared for dozens of patients who have died in hospital with influenza. All of them have had significant comorbidities like COPD, congestive heart failure, coronary atherosclerotic disease, diabetes, chronic renal insufficiency, chronic respiratory failure, obesity, poor functional capacity, etc.

Indeed, in my direct experience and in other hospitalist and intensivist colleagues, death certificates in influenza associated cases nearly always list the more immediate cause of death that was precipitated or exacerbated by influenza.

 

some things make you scratch your head. wouldn't it be easier just to determine if a person likely wouldn't have died if they had not contracted the disease?

 

That’s just it, not so easy.

Take a person on 3-4 liters of continuous oxygen with advanced COPD and/or chronic congestive heart failure (CHF). The person gets admitted to the hospital with a COPD and/or CHF exacerbation and at some point tests PCR positive for influenza during that visit.

Absent influenza, that person might have lived a couple more weeks, a few more months, or in rare cases a couple more years. If it is influenza that tips that person over and she dies now in the hospital, was influenza the cause of death?

So much of this comes down to accounting.

What would be nice to see months from now is to look at patients hospitalized who among all diagnoses have a PCR proven diagnosis of COVID-19 or influenza, then look at mortality regardless of listed cause of death. There will be some technical and accounting problems in doing this too, but it will shed more light on the issue.

 

agreed. and we do need some kind of consistancy in the future to judge how serious an event is, and what precautions are needed and not needed.

 

Nearly all of our population has been exposed to most strains of influenza at some point in their lives through infection or vaccination. Immunity wanes over the years but is not fully lost in most people, and most get yearly vaccinations, so on subsequent infections the morbidity and mortality is substantially less.

SARS-CoV-2, however, is entirely novel to the world population. Except for the elderly, H1N1 in the Spanish Flu of 1918 was the first time the rest of the population was exposed to that virus. The results were catastrophic and morbidity and mortality was compressed into a smaller timeframe than would have happened in a population with vaccination and/or prior exposure.

Would not be surprising to see some similar parallels with SARS-CoV-2.

 

but if you take the elderly and medically compromised out of the stats, you're left with a completely different picture.

 

pharmaceutical, Medical Industries, like most every industry knows what side of the bread that the butter is on. Hysteria is a easier motivator to get people to do that thing which they might not otherwise do .... whether it's take a vaccination, lockdown, protect the environment, or .... (your pet peed here) any # of things. After all, no one gets the death penalty for lying (overstating - mis-speak) for the perceived good of others. Didn't they used to Stone profits when they erred? Even with that high a penalty for, "oops - sorry but i sincerely thought it was true" , it didn't stop false prophets.
.

 

i cannot find any meaning in fatality rates, without demographics, circumstances and prior health conditions

 

i can't figure out why we are still seeing 2,000 cases a day here. people not complying? grocery stores and other open businesses? long term care facilities?