I see where several blogs (and I'm not gonna point fingers) are commenting on Vodkapundit's article on PJ Media, regarding Italy "revising" their Kung Flu death numbers.
Except, not so much. Italy did not go all Democrat on Glenn Youngkin's vote tallies with their COVID death rate, and just try to erase 97% of them. Anyone who suggested that isn't very bright, or worse. They simply moved most of them from "dead only from COVID" to "dead from COVID and more". What, people with pre-existing serious chronic conditions might have died from COVID because those exact conditions made them less able to cope with a debilitating systemic illness? WHO KNEW? I mean, besides every doctor except maybe Dr. Phil, Dr. Jekyll, Dr. Seuss, or Dr. Doolittle.
Look, I like Stephen Green (Vodkapundit), he's a funny guy, and I've watched him for years with Bill Whittle, but the way he's portraying this is flat-out moronic (and face-palmingly wrong), and he needs to put the bottle down before he blogs anything further. And when the alcohol wears off, he's going to have a helluva time getting his foot out of his mouth on this. It's that stupid. Or else deliberately deceptive.
Point of order:
Those people in Italy didn't all spontaneously die without COVID either, and they had all those chronic conditions for years and decades without dying - until they got COVID.
So this is Italy re-arranging deck chairs, and tidying up their casualty lists a very, very small bit.
Not lowering the overall CFR for COVID. Just for "COVID alone".
The videos of dead people stacking up outside hospitals there, or Italian hospitals chock-a-block with the sick and dying, multiple hospitals being overwhelmed, and doctors triaging people over 70 to "wait outside and die quietly", while letting people under 70 into the hospitals for treatment, because they didn't have the resources to care for both groups - like has happened never in modern peacetime history with "just the flu" - didn't just suddenly not happen. And Green knows it.
So let's not pretend those other 97% died from "something else". Didn't happen. They died from COVID plus comorbidities, not the other conditions alone, which exact comorbidities made them a lot more susceptible to dying than people who were otherwise healthy, and got COVID alone.
All this revision tells us is that 97% of the people who died with COVID had a comorbidity, and only 3% of those who died from COVID alone didn't have any such thing.
So the COVID CFR didn't drop by 97%. And Green is either too stupid to notice that he left off the key word "alone" from that sentence, or he's deliberately lying like a sonofabitch. There is no third option besides stupidity or mendacity: he's either a moron, or a liar. It's not a pretty place for him to be.
Nice try, but no cigar.
The COVID alone CFR did drop by 97%. BFD.
COVID still killed just as many people in Italy today as it did when originally reported. Anyone who couldn't suss that out on their own in 0.2 seconds is simply not tall enough for this ride.
Italy is simply acknowledging that a host of conditions gave COVID a great big boost at knocking people off at 28X the rate, in Italy overall, as "just the flu", with those having significant comorbidities like obesity, hypertension, COPD, and cardiac disease, at a tremendous disadvantage compared to people without them.
This "news" is about as earth-shattering as telling me really short people have trouble seeing over the heads of any crowd, and that fat people are easier prey for predators than skinny ones.
And it doesn't change the COVID mortality rate a whit. It simply bifurcates it into those already hamstrung by other problems (97%), and those whacked by the 'rona outright, despite being healthy (3%). Total dead: 100% of those reported dead in the first place. Gee thanks, I feel so much safer now.
This is an exercise in precision, not a revision of absolute COVID mortality downward by 33X.
Telling me people with cardiac conditions survive head-on impacts more poorly than people without them doesn't make head-on collisions safer, either.
There's a lot of people who should know better celebrating a non-news item that is functionally meaningless regarding COVID, and a lot of people who are flaming statistical and mathematical blithering idiots cock-a-doodle-dooing because they're so stupid they don't know what they don't know.
Let's please not fall into either category.
18 comments:
I'll go with stupidity for $500, Alex, er, I mean Aesop. I was a fan of Green's at one time, but his grasp of history is weak, to say the least, and he got testy over it and banned me from his original site. That was before the Instapundit had a brain fart and brought him in for some reason known only to the Invisible Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Natzofast yourself, Aesop.
The problem you’ve overlooked so far is that the stats don’t say that they died of Covid with complications from comorbidities. They could have had a non-severe case and it was their time to go due to the pre-existing conditions.
Dying with Covid does not equate to dying of Covid, and your post blurs the line between.
Hair splitting accomplishes nothing...
We still have the following facts to deal with:
1. Covid-19 is likely an engineered virus that escaped/released from a communist lab.
2. It appears that top U.S. government employees were responsible for funding unethical research in that lab and others in direct violation of US Code.
3. Those people have deliberately tried to hide/obfuscate/deny/hair split the evidence away. This indicates a guilty conscience...
4. A portion of the medical establishment and leadership in this country has enabled/facilitated a crisis of trust between patients and providers by pushing a mass medical/genetic experiment upon the citizens with the FULL SUPPORT OF A TREASONOUS GOVERNMENT.
5. Those same individuals have deliberately suppressed information about the efficacy of cheap generic OTC medications in spite of empirical evidence of their success in curing covid-19.
I could go on and on, but I'm probably preaching to the choir.
It's time to start hanging the bastards. And burning their houses down to the ground. And then run their surviving family family out of town with complimentary tar and feathers.
After a few local yokels and political types get that treatment the rest might be enlightened.
But of utmost importance is that one you identify and attack a communist/socialist/progressive target YOU MUST CHANNEL YOUR INNER MONSTER & utterly destroy the target. If resistance is encountered overcome it with overwhelming force. Do it in such a fashion that the destruction and death become legendary in the annals of history. And then outlaw the democrat party. Strip the citizenship of every democrat between the Atlantic and Pacific. Public hangings broadcast 24/7 on every media outlet. Let all the world see the utter death and destruction meted out to the enlightened parasites of progressivism. Exterminate with extreme prejudice EVERY politician and public employee with any progressive bent.
Maybe then our grandkids will have peace in their lifetime.
@Off The Wall,
Nobody dies of hypertension. Period.
When you get COVID, and you have hypertension, and you die, it wasn't the hypertension that killed you.
All Italy did was move the deaths from "died solely of COVID" to "Died of COVID + XX".
That's. It.
They didn't move them to an imaginary category of "didn't die of COVID", and Green and some other folks have quite simply lost their minds, or they're grinding an axe for something not supported by reality.
Bullshit flag thrown, 15 yards and loss of down.
If they had attributed the deaths appropriately to begin with, perhaps the medical community could have focused on those at risk rather than an across the board approach to causing panic and .gov overreach.
You make a good point Aesop - if it was the straw that broke the camel's back then the patient wouldn't have died without that straw.
But I'm very suspicious about the "Died with Covid" numbers because of the many obvious games that have been played with it. Here in Florida last year there was that kid who wiped himself out on his crotch rocket on I-75. They swabbed the remains and lo and behold got a positive test. Chalk another one up to "Death with Covid". And this wasn't by any means the only example of this.
The Powers That Be have so blown any assumption of trustworthiness that we probably can't ever unwind this mess.
I have cancer AND I am quite old. My oncologist said that with luck I would die of something else before the cancer kills me. WTF was she thinking! That didn't make me feel better. So now no matter what actually kills me and even if I die before my time She could say she was right and the cancer registry can say I died of cancer. A win/win except for me. AND THAT is exactly the problem for those thousands of Italian seniors who would still be alive today except for covid. You can rearrange the deck chairs all you want to but they are still dead.
Government caused government overreach. Covid was just the excuse.
And BP, I trust none of the numbers implicitly, but the motorcycle COVID death has been flogged to death. It's one case. That only leaves the other 753,939 dead people to explain away, but I've seen idiot after idiot try to bootstrap their way from that 1 exception to explaining them all away. One is as retarded as the other.
And any target with 750,000 bullets through it is going to have a few fliers. Throw out 10%, on general principle. and you're still left with more deaths than 8 consecutive worst-flu-=deaths-ever years, in just two.
Anyone trying to magic away 97% of COVID deaths, like they never happened, is quite simply either a fucktard, or a liar on par with Goebbels and Stalin. And they're totally misrepresenting what Italy did.
And if it transpires that of the 4,663,131 people in Italy who got COVID and didn't die were 97% people with no complicating risks, and 3% those with comorbidities, it'll be the most unsurprising result since some guy discovered that water is wet and fire burns.
And BTW, for those who didn't know this,
"co-morbidity" does not mean "that thing that really killed you";
By definition, it means "that thing you also had when that OTHER THING killed you, and in this case, that "Other Thing" is and always has been, COVID.
Even that bastion of accuracy and infallibility, Wikipedia, has sussed that much out all on their own:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comorbidity
Ok so the real question Italy isn't answering is of the 97% who are now listed as dead of covid +X.... how many are actusly died of X with a positive PCR test but covid was not a factor. We all have seen the cases of people who died of car accidents and gun shots counded as covid cases. Even near me a young boy was recently mentioned by the head of the provincial health authority as the youngest covid death. Except the family came out and called BSbecause the kid had no covid symptums but died of stage 4 brain cancer and post mortum tested positive for covid.
So while i find the italian change in designation intetesting i think people are confusing died of covid plus X with died of X but tested positive for covid.
Exile1981
Female late 40s obese asthma. Pops Covid+. She get her hands on Ivermectin. 72 hrs much better. Fever gone SOB gone. O2 sats low 90s to 98. 144hrs almost back to normal. She was poster child for the propaganda. Refusal to provide early treatment killed them by the hundreds of thousands.
@Exile,
That's minimal.
The exceptions are just that: exceptions. Some people gamed the stats, but even granted the wildly optimistic idea that 10% of all reported COVID deaths were totally miscategorized, COVID was still 10-30x worse than the worst "just the flu, bro" exuberant optimism.
It's mildly fatal compared to Ebola, which has a 66-90% kill rate, which is also 20-30x worse than COVID. But Ebola to COVID is like COVID to annual flu.
The people attempting to paint the whole thing as a hoax on the recockulous theory that 97% of COVID deaths were "something other than COVID" are smoking crack and huffing hopeium. And they know it.
On another note, the 5th circuit court of appeals froze the private company mandate due to "grave statutory and constitutional issues". This happened Saturday. The administration has till 5pm Monday to respond...
Grave statutory and constitutional issues sounds kind of like a WTF were you even thinking slap. Not like a "nice try but you're too vague, go back and reword it" ruling.
It'll hit the supreme court fast. Which means John Roberts Quisling will join the conservative wing of the court and write the results with as progressive a bend as he thinks he can get away with.
But at least the private company mandate appears to be headed for the round file.
"By definition, it means 'that thing you also had when that OTHER THING killed you,' and in this case, that 'Other Thing' is and always has been, COVID."
Technically correct, and there are certainly comorbidities which barely, if at all, increase the likelihood of severe illness or death from COVID. However, in common usage "comorbidity" means "that thing that you also had that makes it more likely that if you get COVID you'll get really sick or die." It's getting increasingly quixotic to insist on the usage as you defined it outside of some professional settings
Another case of Aesop is right. Lots of people coming through the morgue had been living for years with a bad heart or lungs. They got along as well as could be expected until they got the rice rabies.
What I really want is the breakdown:
Died of Covid19, no obvious comorbidity
Died of C19, obvious co-morbidity
Died of something not C19, happened to test positive for it a week or so prior or right after death but had no symptoms
But I have doubts thats a realistic thing.
"Telling me people with cardiac conditions survive head-on impacts more poorly than people without them doesn't make head-on collisions safer, either."
No, but it makes it less likely the govt will destroy the car manufacturers, the folks selling cars, maintaining and repairing cars, and companies that handle disassembly and crushing for totaled cars. It would disallow the govt to refuse all citizens any right/ability to own or drive a car. (Of course, illegals get to buy and drive cars; or illegally drive in WITH cars...) The govt wouldn't be able to require everyone to stay home and keep their cars locked up, no matter they can't get to work or grocery shop.
And, hey! Maybe if we stocked the cars with ... you know ... EARLY TREATMENT devices, like, headlights, seatbelts, and BRAKES... then MOST people would be able to AVOID 'catching' a head-on collison and/or dying from one!
"When you get COVID, and you have hypertension, and you die, it wasn't the hypertension that killed you."
No, it was having your kidneys damaged/destroyed by Remdesivir and your lungs blown out by being put on a vent.
Iatrogenic.
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