Comment by CaptWillard
9 days ago
I'm referring to the medicine deployed against a pandemic whose death count is still entirely unknown.
How many people died because of COVID?
You don't know. No one knows.
Meanwhile, everyone who knows better pretends that the most fundamental data about the subject, on top of which all other data and decsions were built ... is garbage.
Do you think the rough death toll of pandemics are fundamentally unknowable to some approximation? Do you think the massive increase in mortality during the pandemic was a coincidence?
Interestingly, excess mortality levels continue to remain extremely high - around 10%. [1]
[1] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores...
Might some of that be due to long-term medical conditions (such as cancer or dementia) that were treated less effectively during the pandemic, but which didn't cause immediate loss of life?
Was there another pandemic whose statistics were based on mandatory asymptomatic testing (via PCR tests with deliberately high Ct values)?
Was there another pandemic where 94-95% of all deaths involved at least one comorbidity, and 77% involved three or more underlying conditions?
This dying "of Covid" vs "with Covid" debate has long been debunked: https://www.reuters.com/article/world/fact-check-94-of-indiv...
TLDR: Those comorbidities are often complications caused by Covid in the first place – like pneumonia or respiratory failure. Sometimes they also include risk factors that could never be treated as a direct cause of death on their own, like obesity (which also happens to be extremely widespread in the US so it gets reported on many death certificates for many illnesses, not just Covid).
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about 7 million people died of COVID according to the WHO: https://data.who.int/dashboards/covid19/deaths
AFAIK, that number more accurately reflects the number of people who died within two weeks of testing positive using PCR tests at high Ct values (35-45), inflating case counts.
94-95% involved at least one comorbidity.
Over 75% had at least four comorbidities.
From further down the page:
> A COVID-19 death is defined for surveillance purposes as a death resulting from a clinically compatible illness in a probable or confirmed COVID-19 case unless there is a clear alternative cause of death that cannot be related to COVID-19 disease (e.g. trauma). There should be no period of complete recovery between illness and death
It does not include cases like someone dying in a car crash who happened to be COVID-positive.
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This is what statistics is for? We rarely ever “know” (in the sense of your restrictive epistemology) the precise value of ANY demographic measure.
We don’t know how many people live in the United States at any particular moment, but the Census is still useful.
It's useful when done in good faith. During COVID there were numerous decisions that even if not intended to inflate mortality figures, then they did so inadvertently. In particular the CDC gave extremely broad guidance on what to classify as a death "of" COVID, and the government was giving hospitals additional funding per COVID death. So for the most ridiculous example of what this led to, in Florida some guy died in a motorbike crash and ended up getting counted as a COVID death because he also had COVID at the time. [1] He was eventually removed from their death count, but only because that case went viral.
Even in more arguable cases, preexisting conditions and extreme senescence are ubiquitous in deaths "of" COVID, and at this point there's probably no real chance of ever untangling the mess we created and figuring out what happened. For instance Colin Powell died at 84 with terminal cancer, Parkinson's, and a whole host of other health issues. His eventual death was flagged as 'caused by complications of COVID.' I mean maybe it really was, but I think the asterisk you'd put there is quite important when looking at these stats.
[1] - https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/florida-motorcyclist-covid...
I’m neither an epidemiologist nor a statistician (just a mathematician pretending to be a coder and/or butterfly), but I do not believe there are no mathematical tools to mitigate the statistical impact of comorbidities and accidental misreporting.
To contextualize this: my position is “weak signals are possible even with noisy data”; I read your response as “but the data is really noisy,” which, sure, agreed; the user I was responding to seems closer to the solipsistic position “there is effectively no data at all.”
Ah yes, because we don't have the exact numbers your appeal to idiocy must be normalized.
Do you know how many people are saved by antibiotics RIGHT NOW? You don't know?! NO ONE KNOWS!
Give me a break, we don't need to dissect every corpse to see how effective the vaccine is.