The Stanford professor who I saw on a recent lex Friedman podcast confirmed what many people already suspected: the death count is exaggerated because the criteria for a Covid death is that a person is dead and also tests positive for Covid regardless of how the person really died. And also that cases were massively undercounted because of the fact that many people never have symptoms bad enough to justify any concern, testing or a hospital visit. That’s what he’s asserting and it’s true.
He said when you sample randomly and follow positive testers to their conclusion, the lethality rate is something like 0.02%. I’m sorry that it upsets you to hear something you don’t already agree with
Why are people still saying this? This statistic has been unmasked to be quite useless and only used for fear mongering so politicians/bureaucrats can cling to their emergency powers.
These “Thousands of deaths” are where the deceased happened to also test positive for COVID. Most of the deaths were people who were already very sick and likely not caused by COVID.
> The official covid death count is likely an undercount of deaths caused by covid, because a number of people died from covid related complications and got recorded as pneumonia, Alzheimer’s, or heart disease/attack/stroke related deaths.
That's a theory. Meanwhile, we know that many places are classifying anyone who dies within N days of a positive test (N is typically 30) as a "covid death", regardless of actual cause.
I can guarantee that not all of those people died from Covid-19. Point being: there's likely to be overcount and undercount, for different reasons.
And that's assuming the count is even accurate. We now know that in some places they categorized people as dying from COVID even if they died from completely unrelated causes just because they did a COVID test on top. So the truth is certainly less.
Covid related death is a highly inflated number, i mean it include people who die and happen to be tested positive for covid, not just die due to covid.
> I also saw a medical worker saying that if someone dies before testing, that will be counted as a COVID death[1]
But this is what happens for flu too. You want to count them using the same methodology. You either use confirmed cases (Covid-19 kills more people than a bad flu year, and yes we do test for flu); or you use confirmed and suspected cases (again, covid-19 kills more than a bad flu year); or you use excess mortality (and this year we have huge increase in excess mortality).
There's no way to look at the data and come up with anything other than "covid-19 kills a lot of people".
That death rate is skewed. A COVID death is counted if the person had the infection and died, even if a co-morbidity would have killed them anyway. A person that has no symptoms or mild symptoms isn’t necessary known to have had the disease, which means there is a significantly lower death rate because the known infections is what’s used for the death rate, not the actual number of infections. A newly released study showed that 4% of Santa Clara County had exposure, but the “confirmed cases” is vastly lower than that. A 5% mortality rate is just false. Confirmed infections can’t be used to determine mortality because the number of actual infections is obviously going to be much higher. Mild or asymptomatic people aren’t going to the hospital to be tested so they aren’t being included in mortality calculations.
Except that it is doubtful that it actually has a 2% death rate. Some huge number of coronavirus infections are not being counted because they are asymptomatic or presenting minimal symptoms[1], and thus those people aren't being tested. In fact, probably even a lot of people with fairly serious symptoms aren't being tested[2]. Only those being tested can test positive and only those testing positive are getting counted, inflating the presumed mortality rate massively. On top of that it seems the tests being used may be giving a lot of false negatives, for example in people who have "recovered" and test negative but then later test positive again, so they may have still been infectious all along.
Bottom line; when you really look at all the facts, it seems that perhaps Covid-19 is no more lethal than any more severe flu.
The sad thing is people I know would tell you the COVID number is _overcounted_ because anyone dying while having COVID is counted as a COVID death.
That is true, but not enough to change the numbers and certainly not enough to make up for the uncounted cases. But when these media outlets get the numbers wrong, it bolsters these ideological positions built around “they’re lying to you”.
> One is a post-epidemic estimate by independent epidemiologists, while the other is a confirmed-positive-death count subject to contemporaneous political pressure and institutional inability to confirm every Covid death.
...as well as almost certain over-counting due to extremely liberal criteria for "Covid deaths" (e.g. deaths within 30 days of a positive test, which is the standard in many areas.)
Point being: there's uncertainty on the "confirmed-positive death count" in both directions and you're assuming that it's a strict lower bound.
Just today, the WSJ published an excess-death study that put the number at 2.8M, worldwide (or 3.5/10,000):
Higher than the JHU numbers, but still within reasonable statistical error of the 1957 pandemic estimates.
> After a couple years once experts have had time to gather and crunch the numbers, the number of Covid deaths from a comparable kind of best-guess estimate is going to double or more. Even in the USA, we are probably missing on the order of 150–200k Covid deaths so far from our confirmed death counts.
Well, now you're just making things up. Also, again: see the WSJ study above. Even if you count every excess death this year as Covid...it's about the same as the 1957 flu season.
It's shocking to see such a statement so far into the pandemic. This is solved and known already, and while complicated, we've figured it out for some time. We can easily see the massive amount of deaths when we look at excess death numbers. Covid deaths are, if anything, undercounted. To believe anything else at this point is to bury your head in the sand and avoid all scientific evidence and medical consensus.
It is entirely plausible that cases are under counted and deaths are over counted.
The thinking goes that if someone is just a little sick they aren't going through the hassle of getting an official test and being counted. If someone is nearing deaths door they are going to take action and go to the hospital or clinic so you're likely to have a very high percentage of cases leading to death being reported. Add on to that the fact that people who died in a car accident and happened to have a non-symptomatic case of covid was added to the death numbers. That might not be a huge number but it will have an effect at some level. I don't see how it could not unless you completely ignore them.
Inaccuracies in data can cut in all directions. In this case though, over counting deaths and under counting cases (a deliberate choice made by the CDC) made the virus seem more deadly than it likely was at the time.
Is there a plausible argument for an under count of deaths? If so, I have not had the pleasure of hearing it.
I think that's a pretty specious argument though. Other statistics are available (especially excess deaths) that can pretty clearly help show what was going on along with the COVID death numbers (i.e. a significant increase in the number of people dying through the pandemic who most likely wouldn't have died during that time otherwise, in proportions generally tracking more or less to the reported COVID deaths). It's not like the reported numbers of COVID deaths exist in a vacuum to be able to be so sceptical of them!
You might be misunderstanding the point. Many people have chosen to promote the lie that the vast majority of COVID deaths can be dismissed using this reasoning, rather than a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction.
They ignore the overwhelming "excess deaths" number and pretend that unless a person had COVID and COVID alone listed, with no co-morbidity, it doesn't count, and therefore 99+% of COVID deaths aren't COVID at all.
This is, of course, not true, as the excess deaths numbers clearly demonstrate. If anything, we're under-counting COVID.
I think most mortality rates of covid are pure speculation right now because we use confirmed cases as denominator and in most cases we have no idea how confirmed cases relate to true number of infections.
We can go back and forth about what constitutes a "COVID death," but if you look at excess mortality for 2020/2021 you will see that if anything, we are under-counting COVID deaths.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say about the false positive PCR tests in asymptomatic patients, but false positives in PCR tests are rare and would barely impact the numerator.
Not going to keep arguing about this, but there are a huge number of different ways we can confirm that our counts are roughly accurate.
There are obvious signals in total excess death counts indicating the number of deaths due to covid, we can do retrospective random testing of early classified covid deaths.
There is no evidence of some systematic conspiracy or anything of the sort. I encourage you to consider that you might be engaging in motivated reasoning.
He said when you sample randomly and follow positive testers to their conclusion, the lethality rate is something like 0.02%. I’m sorry that it upsets you to hear something you don’t already agree with
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