RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/06/are-covid-19-deaths-being-overreported/

Playing loose with the number of fatalities or giving local officials the greenlight to inflate those figures is inimical to the public’s need to get a firm grasp on the danger of the disease.

According to some tracking sites, the U.S. death toll from the novel coronavirus reached 10,000 victims on Monday. Grim reapers on social media noted the “grim milestone” and forecast more grim days ahead for Americans now trapped by government-imposed house arrest as they helplessly watch their savings and livelihoods and freedom implode in real-time.

The U.S. surgeon general warned that this week’s catastrophic death toll will rival those not seen since the most horrific attacks on American soil. Jerome Adams said that the next several days will be “our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment. Only, it’s not going to be localized, it’s going to be happening all over the country.” President Trump and his closest medical advisors also have reiterated that terrifying scenario.

But there is little information available as to what qualifies as a coronavirus fatality for official counts. And there is good reason to approach such tallies with skepticism since reporting from states like New York is suspiciously vague.

If Americans are to believe that COVID-19 poses a mortal risk to the general population and therefore requires the most intrusive measures ever invoked to stop the spread of the deadly virus, then government officials must clarify the classification. Health officials have confirmed that older people and those with underlying medical issues such as heart disease or diabetes are most at-risk; the concern, however, is that fatalities in such cases are always attributed to coronavirus as the main cause of death instead of just noting it as a contributing factor.

Questionable Guidance

Guidelines recently released by the Centers for Disease Control bolster concerns that the death toll is being rigged to show a higher fatality rate.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/who-really-failed-stop-coronavirus-hitting-lloyd-billingsley/

By Sunday, the United States marked almost 350,000 cases of COVID-19, with nearly 10,000 deaths. The pandemic took down a strong economy and millions of Americans are out of work. This disaster might not have happened if a little-known American government agency was doing its job.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention deploys something called the Epidemic Intelligence Service. As Diana Robeletto Scalera of the CDC Foundation explains, the EIS “works day and night domestically and globally to ensure epidemics in other countries do not hit American soil.” EIS disease detectives are “are the ones responsible and they take this role very seriously.” Even so, the coronavirus epidemic certainly hit American soil, so Americans have good cause to wonder about this epidemic intelligence service.

Established in 1951, Scalera notes, the EIS is “a two-year postgraduate program of service and on-the-job training for health professionals interested in the practice of epidemiology.” Since the program began, more than 3,500 EIS “officers” have been trained.

According to the CDC, “EIS officers serve on the front lines of public health, protecting Americans and the global community.” When diseases and public health threats emerge, “EIS officers investigate, identify the cause, rapidly implement control measures, and collect evidence to recommend preventive actions.”

The EIS did not identify the cause of the coronavirus and any rapidly implemented control measures proved a complete failure. So coronavirus victims have a right to wonder what these intrepid disease detectives are really about. As the CDC explains, EIS alumni have gone on to become CDC directors, leading CDC scientists, acting surgeons general, and even World Health Organization assistant directors-general.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/04/fear_not_science_guides_our_current_approach_to_covid19.html

Are Anthony Fauci, the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization our best guides through current events?  Are we so confident in their opinionsmodels of COVID-19 spread that we are willing to risk whole economies? Is it possible that those authorities not only miscalculate, but see such a small piece of the overall biomedical/social picture that they are creating worse problems — by shouting “fire” in a crowded world theater?

I have reason to believe that they will:  As a postdoctoral fellow at Fauci’s NIAID from 2004-2009, and one of its few theoretical biologists, I found Dr. Fauci to be exceptionally knowledgeable about all aspects of virus biology and immunity.  So it is difficult to understand why he and others are promoting models of COVID-19 spread which all but completely ignore the likelihood that most people will have powerful natural resistance against the virus (unless they are quite old, have hypertension, smoke, or have other pre-existing lung or immunological damage).

My guess, judging from historical precedent, is that Dr. Fauci and his colleagues are just plain afraid of what might happen, although we have no real data to make a prediction about what actually will happen. After all, they are human beings, and beings of a particular sort — namely doctors.   Although imagining all hospital beds suddenly filled with coughing people is something that terrifies them beyond belief — as a few have confided to me — doctors sometimes underestimate how much care they could provide to patients in their own homes, if it were absolutely necessary to do so.   

http://www.drroyspencer.com/2020/04/correcting-recent-u-s-weekly-death-statistics-for-incomplete-reporting/

I am seeing an increasing number of people on social media pointing to the weekly CDC death statistics which show a unusually low number of total deaths for this time of year, when one would expect the number to be increasing from COVID-19. But what most people don’t realize is that this is an artifact of the late arrival of death certificate data as gathered by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS).

This first came to my attention as a tweet by some researchers who were using the CDC weekly death data in a research paper pointing out the downturn in deaths in early 2020 and had to retract the paper because of the incomplete data problem. A disclaimer at the CDC website points out the incomplete nature of recent data. While they say that the new totals could be adjusted either upward or downward, it appears that the adjustments are almost always upward (i.e. recent data have a low bias in reported deaths).

As a first attempt to possibly correct for this under-reporting problem, I downloaded the data two weeks in a row (approximately March 30 and April 5, 2020) to examine how the recent data changes as new death certificate data are obtained. I realize this is only one week’s worth of changes, and each week would provide additional statistics. But the basic methodology could be applied with additional weeks of data added.