Covid-19

[Lloyd Braun]

You have equivocated traditional vaccine tech with new vaccine tech. Whether or not they should both be called vaccines makes no difference to me for the sake of this argument. However, you cannot argue from the safety profile of traditional tech to the safety of mRNA tech. Maybe their long-term safety profiles will prove to be similar, or maybe they will prove to be substantially different, but things that are different are not the same and these two techs - even if functionally they are similar - are, in essence, quite different.

Though I thought I would never say it, I agree with XVille, no one is going to have a change of mind based on what is discussed on a message board. I am bowing out (well, I am going to try to anyway, will shall see whether or not I have the willpower).

Principal

I didn’t specify Moderna and Pfizer though I believe their safety is well demonstrated too. J&J is viral vector vaccine however, which I’m sure you are aware is a more traditional type of vaccine. I’m sure you will find flaw in its safety as well. Either way I have no concerns with mRNA safety long term. If anything it is not strong enough to last long term.

Perhaps you have had covid before and it’s not as big a deal to you to be vaccinated. If not there is no avoiding the disease at this point, and choosing not to be vaccinated is choosing the disease. For all the data we have on disease vs vaccine outcomes choosing the disease is a poor choice.

[noteggs]

Miscounting Covid deaths? Say it ain’t so.

https://fullmeasure.news/news/cover-...counting-covid


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

It would seem the number of deaths due to covid is becoming more accurate since early and mid 2020. Sure there may still may be some outliers, but think deaths were under reported in that timeframe as well. Where I continue to be skeptical is number hospitalizations due to covid.

Mainly because of the complexities of the coding process after a patient is admitted to the hospital. Sounds like some institutions are better than others at reporting daily hospitalizations due to covid which are given to their respective state health departments. Know Lloyd said his two systems he works with are.

Here is an article that states the challenges and complexities of hospitalizations due to covid by the Colorado state health department.

https://kdvr.com/news/data/1-in-4-co...-due-to-covid/

[boozehound]

It would seem the number of deaths due to covid is becoming more accurate since early and mid 2020. Sure there may still may be some outliers, but think deaths were under reported in that timeframe as well. Where I continue to be skeptical is number hospitalizations due to covid.

Mainly because of the complexities of the coding process after a patient is admitted to the hospital. Sounds like some institutions are better than others at reporting daily hospitalizations due to covid which are given to their respective state health departments. Know Lloyd said his two systems he works with are.

Here is an article that states the challenges and complexities of hospitalizations due to covid by the Colorado state health department.

https://kdvr.com/news/data/1-in-4-co...-due-to-covid/

I also don't love that source that bjf quoted.

"Hey! Check out this article I found on www.conservativepatriotsknowtherealtruth.com. They are reporting the news that everyone else is afraid to report!" Followed by a link to a website that is so transparently biased that any information from it should be treated with healthy skepticism and fact-checking, not posted in a fit of outrage from somebody's phone.

Listen - There are absolutely deaths that are unrelated to COVID that are being counted as COVID deaths. There is also a cottage industry of people minimizing the impact of COVID by doing things like writing entire articles about small handfuls of deaths that were mischaracterized (likely inadvertently, in my opinion).

If you look at excess deaths in the US since the start of the COVID-19 Pandemic you get a pretty clear picture of the approximate number of deaths truly attributable to COVID, and that number is quite close to the reported death toll (although it was slightly lower last time I looked at it).

[muskiefan82]

If you look at excess deaths in the US since the start of the COVID-19 Pandemic you get a pretty clear picture of the approximate number of deaths truly attributable to COVID, and that number is quite close to the reported death toll (although it was slightly lower last time I looked at it).

I wonder if the decrease in travel, even at the local level, might account for that lower level overall.

[boozehound]

I wonder if the decrease in travel, even at the local level, might account for that lower level overall.

It certainly could be. I have also heard (anecdotally) that there has been an increase in suicides and overdoses. To me it seems like mostly arguing about small numbers in the face of a reality in which about 500K more Americans have died since COVID 19 than 'expected'. I'm also not sure why isn't so important to some people that the number is 500K dead instead of 600K. It's still a lot.

[Muskie in dayton]

If you look at excess deaths in the US since the start of the COVID-19 Pandemic you get a pretty clear picture of the approximate number of deaths truly attributable to COVID plus lockdowns.

Fixed that for you.

[boozehound]

Fixed that for you.

Please explain further. Do you have anything substantive to offer to the conversation?

I know it's a familiar talking point to parrot, but we haven't really had lockdowns for long time now and the excess deaths continue. In addition, many states that didn't lockdown had some of the higher rates of excess deaths (Texas, South Dakota, Alabama, etc.)

How many excess deaths do you think lockdowns caused? 100K? Fine - let's assume it's 100K (which would be a lot when you consider total average US deaths by suicide is around 50K and total drug overdoses are about 90K). Please explain how 500K excess deaths is somehow materially better than 600K. Both seem pretty bad to me, and like something that we should endeavor to put a stop to.

Here is a chart of the weekly excess deaths above the upper bound of statistical significance for reference. It pretty clearly correlates to COVID spikes. It actually even normalized for a while between the start of vaccinations and the acceleration of the Delta variant.



Here is the link to the actual source where you can pivot the data many ways: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/c...ess_deaths.htm

I'd imagine you are going to say that the data from the CDC is 'not credible' in which case I'd ask you to link to a more credible source that refutes that data around excess deaths. I don't believe everything the CDC says, but in this case total deaths is a hard number and statistical analysis of variance is a real thing that you can't really fake.

[paulxu]

I'm sad to say that Spartanburg leads the nation in this category:

Spartanburg County had a rate of 38 COVID patients per 100 beds, the highest hospitalization rate in the country, according to The Post.

[Muskie in dayton]

Please explain further. Do you have anything substantive to offer to the conversation?

I know it's a familiar talking point to parrot, but we haven't really had lockdowns for long time now and the excess deaths continue. In addition, many states that didn't lockdown had some of the higher rates of excess deaths (Texas, South Dakota, Alabama, etc.)

How many excess deaths do you think lockdowns caused? 100K? Fine - let's assume it's 100K (which would be a lot when you consider total average US deaths by suicide is around 50K and total drug overdoses are about 90K). Please explain how 500K excess deaths is somehow materially better than 600K. Both seem pretty bad to me, and like something that we should endeavor to put a stop to.

Here is a chart of the weekly excess deaths above the upper bound of statistical significance for reference. It pretty clearly correlates to COVID spikes. It actually even normalized for a while between the start of vaccinations and the acceleration of the Delta variant.



Here is the link to the actual source where you can pivot the data many ways: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/c...ess_deaths.htm

I'd imagine you are going to say that the data from the CDC is 'not credible' in which case I'd ask you to link to a more credible source that refutes that data around excess deaths. I don't believe everything the CDC says, but in this case total deaths is a hard number and statistical analysis of variance is a real thing that you can't really fake.

The CDC Data are fine, but they don’t analyze lockdown deaths. They do acknowledge that some are attributable to lockdowns though: The 2020 Increase in Death Rates Were The Highest Ever Recorded (cdc.gov). My gut feeling based on the reading and analysis I've done is that this seems in the ballpark: At least 1/3 of excess deaths in the U.S. are already not related to COVID-19

Here are some lines of evidence to how profound this issue is:

• Products - Vital Statistics Rapid Release - Provisional Drug Overdose Data (cdc.gov)
• Overdose deaths are at their highest point ever for a 12-month period in the U.S.
• 15,000 additional non-COVID Alzheimer’s deaths (as of June – likely much higher now)
• 33% drop in heart attack patients, 58% drop in stroke patients
• Increase in cardiac arrests but decrease in EMS calls for them
• Military suicides up 20%

And the biggest problem is we’re only seeing the beginning. All those medical procedures foregone in 2020 (and beyond in some States) will result in premature natural cause deaths for years to come:

• 65 percent decrease in all cancer screenings
• Breast cancer screenings dropped 89 percent
• Colorectal screenings dropped 85 percent
• Projected increase in cancer deaths, including up to 16.6 percent increase in colorectal cancer deaths, 9.5 percent increase in breast cancer deaths, and 5.4 percent increase in lung cancer deaths over the next 5 years

It sound like you're advocating for lockdowns. Is that the case? I hope not, because not only have they had the unintended consequences above, but they also are morally wrong, financially destructive, and have proven to be of no benefit in the long term.

[XU_Lou]

From The Atlantic - not exactly a right wing rag....

This is just another example of the numbers being "doctored" to scare all of you:

"From the start, COVID hospitalizations have served as a vital metric for tracking the risks posed by the disease. Last winter, this magazine described it as “the most reliable pandemic number,” while Vox quoted the cardiologist Eric Topol as saying that it’s “the best indicator of where we are.” On the one hand, death counts offer finality, but they’re a lagging signal and don’t account for people who suffered from significant illness but survived. Case counts, on the other hand, depend on which and how many people happen to get tested. Presumably, hospitalization numbers provide a more stable and reliable gauge of the pandemic’s true toll, in terms of severe disease. But a new, nationwide study of hospitalization records, released as a preprint today (and not yet formally peer reviewed), suggests that the meaning of this gauge can easily be misinterpreted—and that it has been shifting over time."

"Researchers have tried to get at similar questions before. For two separate studies published in May, doctors in California read through several hundred charts of pediatric patients, one by one, to figure out why, exactly, each COVID-positive child had been admitted to the hospital. Did they need treatment for COVID, or was there some other reason for admission, like cancer treatment or a psychiatric episode, and the COVID diagnosis was merely incidental? According to the researchers, 40 to 45 percent of the hospitalizations that they examined were for patients in the latter group."

"The authors of the paper out this week took a different tack to answer a similar question, this time for adults.....

The study found that from March 2020 through early January 2021—before vaccination was widespread, and before the Delta variant had arrived—the proportion of patients with mild or asymptomatic disease was 36 percent. From mid-January through the end of June 2021, however, that number rose to 48 percent. In other words, the study suggests that roughly half of all the hospitalized patients showing up on COVID-data dashboards in 2021 may have been admitted for another reason entirely, or had only a mild presentation of disease."

"At the same time, this study suggests that COVID hospitalization tallies can’t be taken as a simple measure of the prevalence of severe or even moderate disease, because they might inflate the true numbers by a factor of two. “As we look to shift from cases to hospitalizations as a metric to drive policy and assess level of risk to a community or state or country,” Doron told me, referring to decisions about school closures, business restrictions, mask requirements, and so on, “we should refine the definition of hospitalization. Those patients who are there with rather than from COVID don’t belong in the metric.” "

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/a...eading/620062/


These doctors were caught on tape conspiring to make the numbers "more scary" for the public: https://citizenfreepress.com/column-...covid-numbers/


Some examples of how covid deaths are miscounted: https://sharylattkisson.com/2021/09/...ryl-attkisson/


Canada is also dealing with hysteria from manipulated numbers: https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/al...with-covid-19/