ianmSC

New York does not count nursing home deaths that happened outside of the hospitals. That's why their numbers are artificially low. Nursing home residents that died at their place of residence are not counted. Here is a Google Sheet tracking the information nationally. It's over 50% nationally, even with the misleading data reporting by New York.

https://cnycentral.com/news/local/tr...me-in-new-york

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...#gid=435667374

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/202...model-another/

Tengell never changed his mind, he was misquoted (shocking) by the media, but he's always said their strategy was the right one, because it was. I absolutely would take care of Covid-19 patients if I were a doctor. I'm 32 years old, I'm at essentially zero risk. In February (Week 8 on the graph) 2,885 people died in ages 25-44. At peak Covid (Week 15) 3,519 people died in the same age group. 634 more deaths. Out of ~90 million people ages 25-44.

People who are older and have bought into the fear panic (like you) are more than welcome to stay at home for the rest of your lives. I'm not.

ianmSC

https://www.thelocal.dk/20200522/dan...acked-lockdown

Danish health officials specifically did not recommend most of the measures implemented in their country.

"But the Jyllands-Posten newspaper on Friday reported that the list of "possible actions" against coronavirus the Danish Health Authority proposed as late March 10, had included few if any of the draconian lockdown measures Frederiksen announced the next day.

On February 28, the paper reported, Søren Brostrøm, the authority's director, even signed a recommendation which specifically excluded measures which interfered with Danes' freedom, except in extreme circumstances.

Kjeld Møller Pedersen, professor of health policy at the University of Southern Denmark, told the newspaper that Frederiksen had "abused health-care advice".

The government, he said, had "given the impression that it was the advice of the health care authorities to lock down. But that seems to have been untruthful."

The end of the article says they made their decisions based on the "precautionary principle". The government didn't make decisions based on health, they made them out of fear.

AlexCeres

Their neighbors Finland, had 4.6% fatality rate and Norway 2.7%. Sweden broke 10%. They are doing significantly worse than similar countries that had stronger lock downs with an order of magnitude more deaths. I mean, we could go compare them to NYC and say it's a smashing success but apples to oranges doesn't actually say anything about the covid dynamics. Oh wait, Sweden's death rate is HIGHER than NY's 7.6%.

Sweden closed many schools, encouraged remote work, and service industries suffered a substantial decline in customers voluntarily. Their GDP still took it in the face because there has been significant voluntary social distancing.

Using Sweden to claim covid is no big thing is just master class "how to lie with statistics"

ianmSC

You just moved the goalposts and lied with statistics. Because you are wrong. You used case fatality rate when we know that there are many times more cases that are never detected. New York's death rate per 1M population is 1,572, nearly 4x higher than Sweden with an actual lockdown (which of course, didn't work). Literally what are you talking about? They didn't close schools, some private schools closed but public schools never closed. I mean, every single thing you're saying is wrong.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

ianmSC

What relevance does being a neighbor have to do with anything? New Jersey had 1,393 deaths per 1M population, Pennsylvania had 475 deaths per 1M population. So I guess New Jersey's lockdown strategy was the wrong one. Even though they basically did exactly the same things at exactly the same time.

Louisiana had 637 deaths per 1M, Texas had 65. Next door, and Texas opened up earlier and faster and more aggressively. Virginia had 175 deaths per 1M, Maryland had 465, North Carolina 102. You're cherry picking countries to lie with statistics, and then using your same cherry picking in other areas proves the exact opposite point you're trying to make. Because there is no correlation between strategy and outcomes. Which shows you that the strategy was flawed. You just can't handle it.

The burden of proof is on lockdown nutjobs to prove that it worked. Destroying livelihoods and civil liberties means you have to prove to me it worked. Except there is no proof that it worked anywhere, outside of pointing to the hardest hit areas in the world, and somehow supposing having more deaths means that they had the right strategy. Then changing the comparison to neighboring areas, which also doesn't work when looking at neighboring areas elsewhere.

Another example is Spain and Portugal. Spain had one of the strictest lockdowns anywhere in the world, 580 deaths per 1M. Portugal right next door, 146 deaths per 1M.

The cognitive dissonance is mind boggling.

AlexCeres

New York had many many more infections than Sweden. The fatality rate per infection is much lower than Sweden. As for cases that weren't detected, those aren't facts and their unknown value is .. unknown. You're welcome to speculate on how that changes things but that's all it is .. speculation. You seem quite intent to achieving an outcome so I doubt your speculation is worth anything. If you'd like to enter that realm, you'd be better served looking at the total increased mortality rate for these months which strongly suggests the fatality rate for "covid and secondary effects on medical care" are at least twice the official death rate.

ianmSC

No, it's not. Because again, if you look at the official CDC Provisional Death counts, NOT speculation, we are 2% above the threshold for excess deaths this year. 2%. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm

Excess deaths is all cause. Every cause. Everyone who has died this year.

Here is the Euromomo report for all cause mortality in Europe. Excess deaths. Sweden is better off than the majority of these countries, in all cause mortality.

aggie57

I'm always happy to be corrected, but are you really arguing that we should have done nothing and just allowed the virus to run it's course? Even countries like Japan don't agree with that, who did close schools and declared national emergencies but didn't have a lock down simply because legally their Government can not enforce one. It seems that they also have a large army of public health officials trained to trace and isolate cases which they deployed early on with great effect so were able to contain outbreaks quickly.

Noah Fect

I, for one, appreciate your unusually detailed and accessible presentation of the aforementioned bad data. (Yes, I know you're referring to data reporting rather than the data itself, but let's face it, the data is dog$#!+.) If those plots are original, you have a real talent for data visualization, and have clearly combined that talent with a lot of hard work.

I sympathize with a lot of the points you're making, but I don't feel anywhere near confident enough in those statistics to base an argument on them. No one in either the government or the news media, and I mean no one, has an incentive to tell us the truth. That means I have to assume that things are worse than I'm being told, rather than better.

It's one thing (and a bad enough thing to be sure) if this bug does nothing but clean out nursing homes, but there have been some indications that it can do more than that. This thread by S4ordie offers a good example. You can dismiss what happened to his daughter as an isolated anecdote, but it's not so easy to dismiss the complete lack of competence in testing, diagnosis, and treatment that he recounts.

So: there's a new bug in town, we don't know exactly who is vulnerable and who isn't, we don't know anything about its long-term effects on recovered patients, we're hearing conflicting things from different health authorities on a daily basis, everybody has an incentive to lie in one direction or the other, and the President has publicly mused on the merits of mainlining Lysol. That all adds up to extreme caution in my book.

I think we can all agree with that. With the possible exception of any Porsche dealer representatives in the thread...

ianmSC

In retrospect, yes. At the time, I thought lockdowns made sense. As soon as the data started coming out by late March/early April, it was obvious lockdowns were pointless and never worked. Because countries in Europe peaked almost exactly at the same time, just at different levels, and started decreasing before the lockdowns could have possibly had an effect. Especially with the knowledge that started coming out then and has been confirmed now, that the virus outbreak started months earlier than everyone thought, because of China lying and WHO covering it up. People think locking down "early" made a difference. California as an example, issued its stay at home order on March 22nd. The virus was in California in the middle of January (at latest), confirmed by a woman who died with it on February 6th. Locking down 2 months late is not "early". The virus was already running its course, long before we were paying attention.

The initial testing failure meant that cases appeared to be rising much faster in March and April than reality. Deaths are lagging and are reported significantly after they actually happen, which makes it appear that this is going on longer than it actually is. The CDC does a "Weekly Covid View" every Friday, and the update this Friday should show that we were done with the epidemic phase by May 30th, meaning the percentage of deaths with Covid on the death certificate is below the epidemic threshold, which is roughly 6%. Below is a map of Influenza Like Illness Activity in the US from the week ending May 30th and an illustration of the difference in how deaths are portrayed. The CDC codes the deaths when they actually occurred, but Johns Hopkins and all the others report them as the states report. But states report deaths from weeks or months ago by going back and counting.

It's easy to say this in hindsight, which I acknowledge, but this was fairly evident months ago, the last two months have just been *** covering by politicians and mass lying by people incentivized to lie. For example the San Diego County health director said that modeling projected that San Diego saved 12-15,000 lives by locking down. Except assuming the CDC's best estimate of iCFR (0.26%), that would require more people getting the virus than currently live in San Diego County. The flu estimate is 0.10-0.18%, and it actually affects younger people at a much higher rate than Covid-19 does.

sali1980

I think our friend deserves a Nobel prize for discovering a major mess up by countless experts, intelligence agencies and major world leaders or worse global conspiracy to destroy economy and freedom!

https://www.ft.com/content/6bd88b7d-...9-0d5c6fac846c

Global coronavirus death toll could be 60% higher than reported

ianmSC

Nice straw man! Keep trying champ, one day you'll get there. I don't think there was a global conspiracy, just mass incompetence by scientists who were unprepared and trusted information coming from China and The WHO, over-reliance on modeling that was never remotely close to accurate, poor decision making and panic brought on by peer and media pressure and the precautionary principle of "doing something is better than doing nothing". And ironically, all of that panic and reliance on modeling created significantly higher death tolls than was necessary, when politicians forced Covid patients back into nursing homes because the models told them their hospital capacity would be overrun. Those patients infected the nursing homes and caused mass death. Because of panic and bad models, not conspiracy.

Again, all cause mortality cannot hide Covid deaths, because it counts everyone who died. Articles like this are pointless counting exercises and misrepresentations. Here is the CDC with all cause mortality with and without Covid. There are some excess deaths that result from lockdowns (not receiving timely medical care, fear, missed cancer screenings, etc.) Even with those, in recent weeks there are actually MORE deaths attributed to Covid than there is excess mortality. The US is close to 30% of the total Covid deaths globally, and if anything, based on excess mortality, we are OVER counting, not under (assuming that the only reason for excess mortality is Covid, which is the assumption FT makes).

There is no way to officially compare this in Europe because EuroMOMO does not report absolute numbers of deaths for each country. FT is making a guess that can not be proven or disproven.

ianmSC

Thanks for the kind words, I wish I could take credit for this, but most of it is literally just pulled directly from official sources. For some reason, no one in the media seems interested in putting these graphics up for the public, even though they're easily accessible from the CDC, EuroMOMO, etc.. Wonder why!

I don't begrudge you being skeptical and concerned, there are reasons to be concerned if you're elderly and have significant health conditions. But when you look at the underlying medical condition that has had BY FAR the highest increase in deaths because of Covid, it's Alzheimer's and Dementia. That tells you that this specifically targets extremely elderly and extremely sick people. For example, per Pennsylvania's summary below, there have been 98 deaths in people over 100 years old. Yes, over 100 years old, and 52 deaths in people under the age of 50. So almost double the amount of deaths in people over 100 than under 50. There have been 3,432 deaths in people over 80 and 2,450 in people under 80. Despite people under 80 making up ~96% of the population in the state. People 85 and over are 1.9% of the population in PA and have accounted for 2,604 deaths, or 44.3% of the deaths reported.

https://www.health.pa.gov/topics/Doc...2020-06-05.pdf

markchristenson

Agreed!

I don't think this is necessarily true. As a society we have become virtually incapable of acknowledging mistakes (unless bludgeoned into submission over Twitter). Those people who advocated for lockdowns, masks, etc. are incentivized to prove that they were correct, so they would tend to spin the data to make things look worse than they really are. Those who thought lockdowns were a waste of time would typically seek and publish data to make things look better than they really are.

Unfortunately, the supposed "experts" have not done much in the name of maintaining the veracity of experts, and it has left gaping holes for agenda to spin the data in one direction or the opposite one.

stevepow

One of the few comments on this tread that aged well.