George Rebane
For the past week I’ve been poring over various data from different sources on Covid-19 deaths and death rates. It’s been a frustrating enterprise due to definitions ranging from vague to insane, and numbers that just don’t tie. The quest is important though, because we have been deluged for the past couple of months with what can now be called the metrics of mass madness. The ongoing efforts to afflict major damage to our economy are all based on the allegation that a national lockdown will greatly reduce the number of people dying from the virus, and therefore the calls for opening up are nothing less than the voices of greed putting profits before people.
However, when we take a closer look at C19 deaths, the lockdown arguments and reasoning don’t add up. What every histrionics laden report ignores and/or hides is the entire question of how many would have died anyway from their ‘underlying conditions’, or from the legion of other causes that kill almost 2.9 million Americans year in and year out. In other words, at any given age, if you don’t die of this, then you’ll die of that anyway, C19 or no C19.
So, from all the blizzard of mostly irrelevant and bad data available to us, the objective to sustain lockdown arguments is to see if there is an abnormal bump in the current number of deaths due to the corona virus. We must also keep in mind the hanky-panky that is going on with how C19 deaths have been and are being counted – in many health care systems/institutions patients dying of anything during this epidemic have been put down as succumbing to C19. The National Center for Health Statistics assures us that the most reliable data are the “provisional death counts (that) deliver our most comprehensive picture of lives lost to COVID-19. These estimates are based on death certificates, which are the most reliable source of data and contain information not available anywhere else, including comorbid conditions, race and ethnicity, and place of death.” (more here)
So here’s the drill. The CDC tallies total C19 deaths from 1 Feb 2020 to 1 May 2020 at 37,308 out of a total of 719,438 US deaths for that three-month period (here). The current ‘normal’ (pre-C19) annual death rate in 2019 for the US is 8.8 per thousand (here). This says that out of a population of 328,000,000 we have a total of about 2,886,400 Americans die annually, or 722,000 during a three-month period (or 55,500 every week). To emphasize again, this is the pre-C19 death rate for last year. Not to put too sharp a point on it, this year’s total deaths, with C19 raging in that three-month period, don’t even come up to our norm for a three-month period.
The reasonable explanation is that the corona virus’s marginal contribution to America’s annual deaths count is literally so low as to be swallowed by the country’s natural mortality rate. Highlighting (hyping?) C19 deaths due to the worldwide pandemic has made us all accept draconian personal lockdowns and the arguably insane shutdown of America’s commerce. And it has been done without the presentation of any substantive information (i.e. data formatted to support decision making), only the daily death counts and emotional appeals to ‘save human lives’ from the ravages of a disease that is doing little or nothing extraordinary, save focus our fearful attention on it so that we will compliantly accept new layers of controls from federal and state governments pursuing more fundamental agendas while desperately seeking to convince us that they are ‘doing something’. So today we have a population that does not understand the role, power, and development of herd immunity in stopping pandemics. And most certainly, no one has asked to see the extraordinary bump in total deaths caused by C19 (aka SARS-CoV-2). Is this how sheeple behave?
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