The COVID situation in USA based on actual CDC data. Quite a different story...........

[daawg1963]

So……….. I was tired of the propaganda being provided by the “news” whether from the right or the left, and I wanted to take a look at the actual data and formulate my own opinion.

The data is right there on the CDC website: https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Death-Counts-by-Week-Ending-D/r8kw-7aab/data

View attachment 361490

End Week	COVID-19 Deaths	Total Deaths	Pneumonia Deaths	Pneumonia and COVID-19 Deaths	Influenza Deaths	Pneumonia, Influenza, or COVID-19 Deaths
2/1/2020	0	58,460	3,786	0	479	4,265
2/8/2020	1	59,214	3,790	0	520	4,311
2/15/2020	0	58,528	3,812	0	555	4,367
2/22/2020	5	58,613	3,683	1	563	4,250
2/29/2020	7	58,983	3,810	4	652	4,465
3/7/2020	35	59,205	3,934	17	629	4,580
3/14/2020	52	57,925	3,919	27	612	4,555
3/21/2020	565	58,654	4,511	251	551	5,369
3/28/2020	3,147	62,655	6,150	1,423	440	8,264
4/4/2020	9,954	71,900	9,872	4,731	477	15,336
4/11/2020	16,103	78,652	11,935	7,197	472	20,973
4/18/2020	17,005	76,338	11,352	7,284	265	21,149
4/25/2020	15,353	73,363	10,317	6,579	143	19,138
5/2/2020	13,076	68,773	8,896	5,492	65	16,525
5/9/2020	11,093	66,292	7,776	4,680	47	14,226
5/16/2020	9,089	63,899	6,690	3,742	20	12,054
5/23/2020	7,086	60,907	5,801	2,936	23	9,970
5/30/2020	6,035	58,817	5,180	2,443	12	8,784
6/6/2020	4,916	57,741	4,794	2,108	11	7,613
6/13/2020	4,115	56,446	4,414	1,834	11	6,703
6/20/2020	3,692	55,534	4,187	1,557	6	6,328
6/27/2020	3,598	54,740	3,976	1,477	10	6,106
7/4/2020	4,074	54,491	4,120	1,808	4	6,387
7/11/2020	4,788	54,577	4,747	2,265	7	7,277
7/18/2020	5,087	51,686	4,678	2,420	11	7,353
7/25/2020	3,483	42,415	3,484	1,621	6	5,349
8/1/2020	739	20,660	1,222	362	3	1,602
Total Feb to July 2020	143,098	1,599,468	150,836	62,259	6,594	237,299

and https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/cases-in-us.html

View attachment 361491
Using the CDC data without any manipulation, I made this graph:

View attachment 361948

Without any political narrative - I am sick of those - here is what the data says:

1 - As a baseline, without COVID, the weekly standard mortality in the US over the period February to July appears to be between ~40,000 and ~60,000 people/week, being higher in the winter months and lower in the summer months as expected.

2 - In the period February to July 2020 CDC assigns ~9% of US death to COVID as a single agent (more deaths are attributed to multiple agents including COVID, pneumonia and influenza, but assigning death cause among the three would be speculative).

3 - In the period February to July 2020, standard pneumonia alone has killed 8,000 more people than COVID in the US (~151,000 vs. ~143,000).

4 - The peak of COVID mortality in the US (so far) was in April 2020.

The data seems to support the following conclusions:

1) The notion that COVID is currently hitting catastrophically the Sun Belt in the US is not supported by the data. Weekly deaths in June / July are approximately 1/3 of April deaths.

2) The notion that the East Coast was greatly more successful than the Sun Belt in controlling COVID in the US is not supported by the data. The East Coast peak correspond to the April / May deaths (~105,000), while the Sun Belt peak corresponds to the June / July deaths (~33,000) with the addition of upcoming August deaths since death is a lagging indicator.

3) I was surprised to see that influenza alone is reported to have killed only ~6,500 people in the period. I expect that influenza deaths are under-reported and that the undetermined category “Pneumonia, Influenza, or COVID-19 Deaths” includes a fair number of influenza deaths because the typical annual influenza deaths in the US are 37,500 over the last 10 seasons (https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html#:~:text=While the impact of flu,61,000 deaths annually since 2010.) and there is no reason to believe that influenza mortality for the 2019/2020 season would suddenly be half or a third of its usual mortality.

4) While not insignificant, with ~9% of the total deaths in the period for the US, COVID is far from being the leading cause of death in the US in the period.

Since the conclusions derived from the data were so different from what the “news” narrative led to believe, this prompted me to make one more graph using strictly the CDC data:

View attachment 361493

If we compare the weekly number of new cases (blue infection curve) with the weekly number of new deaths (red mortality curve) in the US, the story further departs from what we hear on the “news.” I am not an epidemiologist, and do not pretend to be one, but to my lay eyes it seems that the societal situation is rather good and that we are in the process of developing herd immunity.

Considering the on-going feud between the Administration and the CDC, I do not expect the CDC numbers to be manipulated to favor the Administration. For lack of any evidence to the contrary, I am taking these at face value…

I thought this could be of interest. This is strictly data-based...

SCAMDEMIC SPOT ON SIR THEY JUST FEAR MONGERING AT THIS POINT

 

[One Day...]

Points one and two. I was talking about mortality and you are talking about mortality rate.

Yes indeed, Jeff.

Absolute numbers have in themselves very little meaning because they are deprived of context. And of course the total number of COVID deaths will only be increasing as every new day adds to the previous day cumulated total. The absolute number of deaths, as tragic as it is, does not help measure whether the situation is improving or worsening. Only the death rate (i.e. the number of deaths compared to the number of cases) is meaningful for the purpose of managing toward a solution.

The absolute number of deaths makes a great "news" sensationalist talking point, but a very poor adaptive management scientific indicator.

Point three: the Federal government offered no coherent response.

There is no shortage of opinions on this issue, and this is fine.

My personal perspective is that I tend to think that opinions have very little value. There is no qualification requirement to have an opinion... I prefer to rely on facts.

I will not even compare facts with models, because for a large part models are also a form of opinion. Models will tell you whatever you want them to say based on the parameters you choose to select for the modeling. As we have seen, there has been no shortage of phantasmagorical modeling for COVID...

Objective facts are that the emergency field hospitals erected in the Javits Center in New York or in White Plains NY, or the Navy hospital ships deployed in New York and Los Angeles, were essentially not used. Objective facts are that, so far and by far, ICUs have not been overwhelmed. Stressed? Yes. Overwhelmed? No.

This does not mean that these deployments were erroneous, but this factually means that they were part of a federal response, along with a massive surge in ventilators, PPE, etc. production, which I personally deem far from incoherent, if only for the simple fact that the system withstood the test.

I am also not overly alarmed by the "news" alarmist reports of 85% to 90%+ ICU occupation. What do people think? That medical corporations build ICUs designed to be routinely occupied at 25%? They would loose their shirts if they did that... In fact a major medical study published in 2013 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3840149/) concluded that over the three years studied, total ICU occupancy ranged up to 82.1%.

I will let the pundits argue endlessly the should have, could have, would have... These, again, are opinions, and I have little interest in them...


As to the rest, we can all agree that COVID is tragic and that we would all prefer a world without it, but this is not really a choice that we have. Yes, a lot of things could be done to prevent a lot of deaths: healthy diets would drastically prevent millions of premature deaths from a cascade of medical conditions; eradication of illegal drugs, criminality, street violence would prevent countless deaths; safe driving would prevent automotive accidental deaths; eliminating guns would prevent gun deaths; etc. and I am sure indeed that more drastic preventive measures such as complete economic, political and societal lockdown/shutdown would prevent some COVID deaths. No argument here.

The questions of whether drastically increased costs (financial and social) of the evolving COVID response would be proportional to the evolving COVID threat, and how as a nation we deal with this question, would still stand

 

[TXhunter65]

One day, you'll never slow that lemming down, he's full speed ahead.

 

[Red Leg]

Checked today's "we're all going to die" statistics.

Total US cases: 5,184,607 Total fatalities attributed to Covid 19: 165,331

Total EU/UK/EEA cases 1,841,114 Total fatalities attributed to Covid 19: 183,957

I'll let the terrified and current administration loathing do their own math and draw their own conclusions with respect to the data. (Hint - I actually don't believe that European health care is that much worse than ours - but I do suspect our testing is far more thorough - despite what our MSM would have us believe).

Love an opportunity to play this again.

 

[Wheels]

Checked today's "we're all going to die" statistics.

Total US cases: 5,184,607 Total fatalities attributed to Covid 19: 165,331

Total EU/UK/EEA cases 1,841,114 Total fatalities attributed to Covid 19: 183,957

I'll let the terrified and current administration loathing do their own math and draw their own conclusions with respect to the data. (Hint - I actually don't believe that European health care is that much worse than ours - but I do suspect our testing is far more thorough - despite what our MSM would have us believe).

Love an opportunity to play this again.

Oh No! We have 5 million cases? That means we only have 55 million more to go before we reach 2009's swine flu numbers.

 

[Red Leg]

This is another analysis that takes the relative long term impact of the draconian measures taken to "flatten the curve" (long since accomplished) when compared to the short term effort of attempting to reduce Covid deaths. It appeals to me because it takes into account both direct trade-offs such has how many cancer patients should we kill to save the next Covid patient and the long term health associated economic damage.

Revolver Exclusive Study: COVID-19 Lockdowns Over 10 Times More Deadly Than Pandemic Itself - Revolver News

A groundbreaking new study commissioned by Revolver News concludes that COVID-19 lockdowns are ten times more deadly than the actual COVID-19 virus in terms of years of life lost by American citizens. Up until this point there had been no simple, rigorous analysis that accurately and...

www.revolver.news

It will be too complicated for the typically uneducated millennial to follow, and likely not the sort of thing the average reader fully vested in the "we are all going to die" hysteria will wish to try and comprehend. I commend it to the more rational members of our forum.

 

[WAB]

Very interesting read, thanks!

 

[spike.t]

Very interesting read, thanks!

Yup...very

 

[edward]

man,i just love this site!!!!still some humor and sanity still abound.

 

[crs]

All politics aside, My mind was made up early in the year by two simple things:
1. A paper by a Paris Doctor that reported great success with HCQ + an antibiotic. In and out cured in 6 days. The Doc report also stated that President Trump was informed of the treatment.
2. I emailed copies of the paper on to friends and relatives and a niece soon responded that the hospital where she worked used the same treatment with great success.

Since then all the MSM coverage was total BS and obviously so. With time, the truth is coming out - the panic was political and a total farce. It also did great damage to our country.

 

[Tucketed]

Not sure if this was posted before. This WHO study prior to the Covid politics was done in 2019 relating to influenza which is similar viral size to COVID. Although I do wear a face mask in stores etc the section on efficacy of face masks is interesting. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-bQve-xvNnXBpyASzTfSKW4SLzYHz1_p/view

 

[mdwest]

 

[Uncle Sauce]

Received this in email form which is a short summary of a study that was published recently in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Credit due to the author Jeff Brown
(I shortened this up a bit due to space & size)
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
The purpose of the study was to determine the efficacy of public health measures for COVID-19. This includes things like masks, hand sanitizer, and social distancing.

Researchers used U.S. Marine recruits on Parris Island, South Carolina, to conduct the study. This was a great decision. After all, the authors could essentially ensure 100% compliance with the personal health measures in order to get the highest quality results from the study.

Every Marine recruit quarantined for two weeks prior to moving to Parris Island to ensure that they weren’t infectious. The study started with a clean slate.

1,848 recruits participated in the study and adhered to the study’s public health measures:

• All recruits wore double-layered cloth masks at all times indoors and outdoors.
• They stayed at a distance of at least six feet.
• No one was allowed to leave the campus.
• No one had access to personal electronic devices or anything else that might be a surface for spreading transmission.
• They practiced routine washing of hands.
• Recruits cleaned their rooms daily (of course).
• They sanitized their bathrooms with bleach wipes with each use.
• They ate pre-plated meals in a dining hall that was cleaned with bleach after each platoon ate.

I think we’ll agree that these are very strict measures taken in the hopes of stopping the spread of COVID-19. The high compliance and repeated cleanings after each use make this study unique.

There were also 1,554 nonparticipants who did not take these measures. Over a 14-day period, all of the recruits were tested for COVID-19.

We would expect the infection rates to be higher in those who did not participate in the strict personal health measures.

But that’s not at all what happened.

By day 14: 51 of the 1,848 participants had tested positive for COVID-19. Only 26 out of the 1,554 nonparticipants tested positive.

In other words:

• Those who wore masks, used bleach, and stayed strictly distanced tested positive at a rate of 2.8% within the first two weeks.
• Those who didn’t and went about a normal life tested positive at a 1.7% rate over the same time period.

The authors drew no conclusions. They didn’t explore why the personal health measures were unsuccessful in stopping the spread of COVID-19 and produced worse results.

They also didn’t explore why the infection rate was lower for those who didn’t participate.

 

[Countrylife]

Here's the full article if you want to read the whole thing:

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2029717?query=featured_coronavirus

The above post looks like a pretty good summary to me.