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I know this is going to sound conspiratorial but I think you’d have to be pretty naive to accept the reported deaths in the US due to Covid to be that accurate.

by tjr225 5y ago

I know this is going to sound conspiratorial but I think you’d have to be pretty naive to accept the reported deaths in the US due to Covid to be that accurate. Hospitals(which in the US are for profit mind you) were quite literally given more money for reporting a death as a Covid death for a period of time. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/04/24/fact-check-medicare-hospitals-paid-more-covid-19-patients-coronavirus/3000638001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/04/24/fac... Actually you could say it’s difficult to trust the numbers coming from any country for a variety of reasons, whether it be under or overreported.

sofixa 5y ago
You can use excess deaths then, those numbers are even higher. And even if official Covid numbers are inflated, even tenfold, it's still a disease that resulted in a lot of death.
- Karunamon 5y ago
  A non trivial portion of excess deaths can be laid at the feet of the response to the virus, not necessarily the virus itself. This would include the things like firing healthcare workers, leading to other problems being undiagnosed, and worsening instead of being treated. I would also include lockdowns and mask mandates as being responsible for increased amounts of depression, which has a known poor impact on survival over time, and that's not just counting suicide.
  - jatone 5y ago
    we maybe fired less than a tenth of a percent of health care workers. and most were not even nurses they were janitors and the like. a few thousands in a field of hundreds of thousands. if your going to make shit up at least make up believable bullshit.
    - Karunamon 5y ago
      No need for the attitude. And it doesn't have to be widespread - given the thin staffing margins that hospitals already run on, losing a small amount of people in a large facility can have outsized effects.
      - jatone 5y ago
        there is no need for you to spread completely unfounded conspiracy theories without evidence to back it up either but here we are.
        Karunamon 5y ago
        You yourself said we're talking about a few thousand people. The idea that losing that many people all at once (within the space of a month or two), especially during a time of increased hospital usage, has no impact on outcomes (which is what you appear to be arguing), is asinine. I'd thank you to engage with the argument in good faith per the site guidelines, or don't bother responding.
        jatone 5y ago
        tl;dr; when you start having the discussion in good faith I will. once you actually have a position that can be discussed. show me evidence of your position and I'll stop calling it a bat shit insane conspiracy theory. right now all you've done is assert complete bullshit. I can link to articles with hospitals stating how many of their staff they've fired due to anti-vax behaviors. I doubt you can find a single instance of a hospital shortage due directly to the few thousand works in the entire country who were fired for their anti-vax beliefs. even if you did find a hospital in that position, the issue certainly isn't wide spread enough to even merit a footnote when it comes to health policy.
walterbell 5y ago
> difficult to trust the numbers coming from any country for a variety of reasons This must be a golden age for those doing a dissertation on media studies. So many quant-driven narratives, so little time. Hopefully cross-country data and narratives are being archived and aggregated into an open-data academic repository that can be studied in coming years.
- djbebs 5y ago
  Given that raw data of vaccine trials aren't even being made public I doubt that any reliable data is being collected, let alone analysed
  - walterbell 5y ago
    Progress is slowly being made on transparency. For the Omicron-specific Pfizer vaccine, the clinical trial in humans must be completed before approval and clinical trial data must be submitted at the same time (no 75-year delays). https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/pfizer-biontech-launch-trial-omicron-targeted-covid-vaccine-2022-01-25/ https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/... > recent study from Israel showed that while a fourth dose of an mRNA vaccine boosted antibodies, the level was not high enough to prevent infection by the Omicron variant ... the debate appears to have shifted with the European Medicines Agency (EMA) saying on Friday that international regulators now preferred clinical studies to be carried out before approval of a new vaccine ... it may not be possible to realise a current plan to launch an Omicron-targeting vaccine by the end of March ... Inclusion of clinical trial data in the regulatory filings may have an impact on the delivery of initial batches.
  - vkou 5y ago
    At this point, given that the quantity and quality of the public data of vaccine rollouts dwarfs the data of vaccine trials in both scope and usefulness, anyone still grousing about vaccine trial data is just playing political football, for the sake of FUD. It's like arguing about the raw data of the Wright brothers flight, when millions of people are flying around the world on 747s. Was it relevant in the past? Yes. Is it relevant today? No. You want to know about vaccine safety? Look at excess mortality, hospital admissions, and long-term health problems of the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations, today. Ten billion COVID vaccines have been administered around the world in the past year. Any of the data we've gathered from that is about a thousand times more relevant to literally anything we could be doing, than raw study data on a few thousand people.
shafyy 5y ago
Actual people dying because of Covid is probably even higher than what the official data reports, see: https://twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/1486075272638119936?s=20 https://twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/1486075272638119936?s=2...
rcpt 5y ago
You're right that does sound conspiratorial
WheatM 5y ago
innocentoldguy 5y ago
This is just one reason for doubting the accuracy of the reported number of COVID-related deaths. Fauci, Chicago's Department of Public Health, and others have admitted that they've counted deaths as COVID deaths if the person tested positive for COVID while in the hospital. Dying from COVID and dying with COVID are two different things, but both have been lumped together in the CDC's death tally. Some doctors are reporting adverse/fatal effects associated with the use of Remdesivir (which hospitals are using to treat COVID patients). These issues include acute kidney injury, bradycardia, and death. The CDC has counted these deaths as COVID deaths as well. There are also other aspects of COVID that seem difficult to suss out. For example, how many people have died from the vaccines? VAERS is reporting 22,193 vaccine-related deaths and over 1 million adverse reactions. There are also deaths and suicides caused by our response to COVID; e.g., the lockdowns, depression, job loss, fear of going to the doctor/hospital due to COVID, etc. Those aren't being counted as COVID-related deaths by the CDC, but perhaps they should be. Even if you removed all the politicization/propaganda of both COVID and the vaccines, it still seems like we've made a lot of mistakes during the past two years that would make producing an accurate death count virtually impossible.

by tjr225 5y ago

sofixa 5y ago

You can use excess deaths then, those numbers are even higher. And even if official Covid numbers are inflated, even tenfold, it's still a disease that resulted in a lot of death.

Karunamon 5y ago
A non trivial portion of excess deaths can be laid at the feet of the response to the virus, not necessarily the virus itself. This would include the things like firing healthcare workers, leading to other problems being undiagnosed, and worsening instead of being treated. I would also include lockdowns and mask mandates as being responsible for increased amounts of depression, which has a known poor impact on survival over time, and that's not just counting suicide.
- jatone 5y ago
  we maybe fired less than a tenth of a percent of health care workers. and most were not even nurses they were janitors and the like. a few thousands in a field of hundreds of thousands. if your going to make shit up at least make up believable bullshit.
  - Karunamon 5y ago
    No need for the attitude. And it doesn't have to be widespread - given the thin staffing margins that hospitals already run on, losing a small amount of people in a large facility can have outsized effects.
    - jatone 5y ago
      there is no need for you to spread completely unfounded conspiracy theories without evidence to back it up either but here we are.
      - Karunamon 5y ago
        You yourself said we're talking about a few thousand people. The idea that losing that many people all at once (within the space of a month or two), especially during a time of increased hospital usage, has no impact on outcomes (which is what you appear to be arguing), is asinine. I'd thank you to engage with the argument in good faith per the site guidelines, or don't bother responding.
        jatone 5y ago
        tl;dr; when you start having the discussion in good faith I will. once you actually have a position that can be discussed. show me evidence of your position and I'll stop calling it a bat shit insane conspiracy theory. right now all you've done is assert complete bullshit. I can link to articles with hospitals stating how many of their staff they've fired due to anti-vax behaviors. I doubt you can find a single instance of a hospital shortage due directly to the few thousand works in the entire country who were fired for their anti-vax beliefs. even if you did find a hospital in that position, the issue certainly isn't wide spread enough to even merit a footnote when it comes to health policy.

walterbell 5y ago

> difficult to trust the numbers coming from any country for a variety of reasons This must be a golden age for those doing a dissertation on media studies. So many quant-driven narratives, so little time. Hopefully cross-country data and narratives are being archived and aggregated into an open-data academic repository that can be studied in coming years.

djbebs 5y ago
Given that raw data of vaccine trials aren't even being made public I doubt that any reliable data is being collected, let alone analysed
- walterbell 5y ago
  Progress is slowly being made on transparency. For the Omicron-specific Pfizer vaccine, the clinical trial in humans must be completed before approval and clinical trial data must be submitted at the same time (no 75-year delays). https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/pfizer-biontech-launch-trial-omicron-targeted-covid-vaccine-2022-01-25/ https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/... > recent study from Israel showed that while a fourth dose of an mRNA vaccine boosted antibodies, the level was not high enough to prevent infection by the Omicron variant ... the debate appears to have shifted with the European Medicines Agency (EMA) saying on Friday that international regulators now preferred clinical studies to be carried out before approval of a new vaccine ... it may not be possible to realise a current plan to launch an Omicron-targeting vaccine by the end of March ... Inclusion of clinical trial data in the regulatory filings may have an impact on the delivery of initial batches.
- vkou 5y ago
  At this point, given that the quantity and quality of the public data of vaccine rollouts dwarfs the data of vaccine trials in both scope and usefulness, anyone still grousing about vaccine trial data is just playing political football, for the sake of FUD. It's like arguing about the raw data of the Wright brothers flight, when millions of people are flying around the world on 747s. Was it relevant in the past? Yes. Is it relevant today? No. You want to know about vaccine safety? Look at excess mortality, hospital admissions, and long-term health problems of the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations, today. Ten billion COVID vaccines have been administered around the world in the past year. Any of the data we've gathered from that is about a thousand times more relevant to literally anything we could be doing, than raw study data on a few thousand people.

shafyy 5y ago

Actual people dying because of Covid is probably even higher than what the official data reports, see: https://twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/1486075272638119936?s=20 https://twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/1486075272638119936?s=2...

rcpt 5y ago

You're right that does sound conspiratorial

WheatM 5y ago

innocentoldguy 5y ago

This is just one reason for doubting the accuracy of the reported number of COVID-related deaths. Fauci, Chicago's Department of Public Health, and others have admitted that they've counted deaths as COVID deaths if the person tested positive for COVID while in the hospital. Dying from COVID and dying with COVID are two different things, but both have been lumped together in the CDC's death tally. Some doctors are reporting adverse/fatal effects associated with the use of Remdesivir (which hospitals are using to treat COVID patients). These issues include acute kidney injury, bradycardia, and death. The CDC has counted these deaths as COVID deaths as well. There are also other aspects of COVID that seem difficult to suss out. For example, how many people have died from the vaccines? VAERS is reporting 22,193 vaccine-related deaths and over 1 million adverse reactions. There are also deaths and suicides caused by our response to COVID; e.g., the lockdowns, depression, job loss, fear of going to the doctor/hospital due to COVID, etc. Those aren't being counted as COVID-related deaths by the CDC, but perhaps they should be. Even if you removed all the politicization/propaganda of both COVID and the vaccines, it still seems like we've made a lot of mistakes during the past two years that would make producing an accurate death count virtually impossible.