Tortoise wrote: ↑Tue Sep 22, 2020 7:49 pm
vnatale wrote: ↑Tue Sep 22, 2020 6:53 pm
What else could be the reason for "excess deaths" this year?
Many or even most of the excess deaths could be due to Covid-1984, or they could be largely due to the unintended consequences MangoMan mentioned. We don't know for sure. It's all guesswork.
But my point about Covid-1984 "cases" still stands: For a given person who (a) has a fever or a cough and (b) tests positive for SARS-CoV-2, how do we know their fever or cough is
caused by SARS-CoV-2? Isn't it possible that SARS-CoV-2 caused no symptoms in that person, and their fever or cough is actually caused by the common cold or the flu?
Covid-1984 statistics seem to be based on some unspoken assumptions that aren't necessarily justified.
This is why Ivor Cummins' Youtube discussion of this issue is so important to understand.
There are NOT excess deaths this year overall, compared to an average of the last 20-25 years. We do have a bump in excess deaths in March and April, and that was certainly a big deal. Since May, the death rate has been
below normal. Just emphasizing that in case anyone misses it.
Also, the light 2019 flu season played a role. A lot of people who would normally have died of flu in the months preceding COVID did not, increasing the supply of vulnerable people for COVID to pounce on.
Once the people who were going to die of something (whatever happened to come along first) did so, the vulnerable population was then lessened and now we have overall lower mortality for the remainder of the year. That means that the COVID death count is really no more than a statistical anomaly, taken out of context. Tortoise's point is exactly correct: the over-sensitive PCR test will find viral fragments that means that the person was exposed to COVID-19 at some point in the past. It could have been this week, last month, or months ago. If the person then dies, they are now counted as a COVID death even though there is no way to prove that COVID was clinically relevant.
This isn't to say there haven't been COVID tragedies and some shortened lives. It's just that if you place it in context with all the other bad things that happen to people, everything from accidents to cancer to heart attacks to the flu, COVID is probably small potatoes. If we treated any of those other causes of death the same statistical way we are treating COVID (like, has the person ever been in a car accident prior to death), we'd probably come up with some pretty horrific sounding numbers for those too.