NOTE: See the update at the bottom of this post for essential context.
According to Walensky, over 75% of COVID deaths occurred in people with 4 or more comorbidities.
4 plus is actually a surprise for me; I would have guessed 1 or more. I wonder what the percentage is for people with no comorbidities.
To compare with the flu, according to the CDC, anywhere from 12,000 to 52,000 people died in the US from the flu each year from 2010 to 2020. According to the WHO, the number is 290,000 to 650,000 worldwide. Presumably, most people who die from the flu also have comorbidities. According to the CDC, the US has had about 835,000 deaths from COVID since Jan. 21, 2020, or an average of roughly 417,500 annually.
UPDATE: Elise has very helpfully pointed out that the context for Walensky's remark was a discussion of COVID deaths among the vaccinated. Contrary to what I first thought, she was NOT saying that 75% of all deaths from COVID had 4+ comorbidities. Instead, among the tiny number of vaccinated people who have died from COVID, 75% had 4+ comorbidities. That's a big difference.
27 comments:
According to the CDC, the US has had about 835,000 deaths from COVID since Jan. 21, 2020, or an average of roughly 417,500 annually.
That works out, if the Sobbing Doomsayer's claim can be taken seriously, of around 105,000 without comorbidities dying of/with the Wuhan Virus annually. Of/with. Worse, SD says she's unable to discriminate the deaths which were from the virus, from the deaths that were from another cause with the virus merely present.
Even with the comorbidities involved, there are four categories of deaths that are of interest to any serious policy:
• Those for whom the virus was the sole cause of death
• Those for whom the virus was the primary cause of death, but the comorbidities were contributing factors
• Those for whom the comorbidities were the primary cause of death, but the virus was a contributing factor
• Those for whom the comorbidities were the sole cause of death, and the virus was merely present.
SD says the CDC didn't even bother collecting anything resembling those data until the Omicron variant appeared, and she's vague on when after Omicron's onset she bothered to have her CDC start collecting data. She's obviously not responsible for those data regarding the original virus; that's on Redfield, but the Delta variant was mostly on her watch.
I'm reminded of an injunction of a Lt Col with whom I worked at a Test Squadron: "Never pass up a chance to collect data."
It's disgusting.
Eric Hines
We have been through this before, E Hines. The of/with distinction is artificial and should have been dropped long ago. We have a million excess deaths, with no other cause accounting for more than a few percent. There is both an undercount and overcount of covid depending on rules and locale (some places do not allow a covid cause of death to be put on the certificate unless there is a positive test, for example. Even if you die choking on your own fluids and your entire household has covid.) In aggregate, it is an undercount. That means there are close to a million people who would not be dead if the virus had not come to our shores. To find it significant that those people might not be dead without other causes added in is not something recognised in death statistics anywhere else. It has been made up for this occasion.
I am always suspicious of folks ladling in the word "serious," as if to imply that those who disagree are not. That has usually been the province of liberals until the last few years. This is one of the reasons why I put up my hands when the more libertarian members here say that we can trust people to make good decisions on their own. If only.
We have a million excess deaths, with no other cause accounting for more than a few percent.
Your determined emotionalism of hyping the raw number of deaths while stripping off their context of extremely low probability of occurrence--a tiny fraction of 1% given a case, and even lower given infection--for the healthy, not much higher for the elderly, and only serious for those with comorbidities, is old and tiresome.
It's no longer useful to engage with you on this subject; you've shown yourself to be unserious on this and a waste of my time.
Eric Hines
Bad things generally have multiple causes: if you read the NTSB reports on aircraft and railroad accidents, you'll see that very often they identify a chain of causes...any one of which factors, had it not been present, would have kept the accident from happening.
The question with Covid death counting is the degree to which the co-existing factors were something like preexisting respiratory problems which were accelerated and made fatal by the Covid infection...versus to what degree they were something like trauma from an accident, which brought a Covid-infected person to the hospital, but where the Covid did not increase the death probability from the accident.
Concerning Excess Deaths, it seems likely that at least some of these were due to people not getting treatment for other conditions, because of lockdowns and fear, and some were caused by Diseases of Despair, especially in young people. But OTOH, the counted Covid deaths numbers and the excess deaths numbers track each other reasonably well, across a lot of different countries.
Which brings up another point: there are a lot of countries in the world, and some of the track their health statistics at least as well as the US, maybe better in some cases. And it's unlikely that they all mis-count Covid deaths in exactly the same way.
House rules, gentlemen, since 2004.
https://grimbeorn.blogspot.com/2004/03/texas-mercury.html?m=1
“As we see it, modern society has all the important ideas of life exactly backwards: we are completely against the belief in sensitivity and tolerance in politics and raffish disregard in private life. [We are{ founded on the opposite principles- our idea is of tolerance and polite sensitivity in private life and ruthless truth in politics. Be nice to your neighbor. Be hell to his ideas.“
"SD says the CDC didn't even bother collecting anything resembling those data until the Omicron variant appeared, and she's vague on when after Omicron's onset she bothered to have her CDC start collecting data."
The problem is we seem to have come to believe that the role of public health agencies is to *solve* the problem. They aren't elected leaders, their job is to advise the decision makers- nothing more. Some of that advice may be about how to "solve" the problem at hand, but the first and foremost job of theirs in a situation like this should be to collect good data, and so first to establish good protocols for information gathering. Without good data, how can *anyone* come at a solution? Yet they've failed at this from the beginning, and continue to long after it's been pointed out many times that they have failed. Incredible really. Only a government agency could be this bad.
Role of the public health agencies...collect good data, analyze it intelligently, advise the decision-makers, AND, within the parameter of the decisions that are made, conduct communications with the public. This latter part has also been done extremely poorly; there has been too little in the way of clear and honest information presentation and far too much in the way of preaching and hectoring.
btw, here is a pretty good example of public communications in another field, the FAA's recent release on the 5G versus radio altimeter issue. Good graphical explanation of why the example of France is not necessarily a guarantee of safety in the US environment:
https://www.faa.gov/5g
I tend to put reported COVID deaths in two categories: one is the "died from a motorcycle accident but tested positive for COVID in an absence of symptoms." That one I don't take seriously as a COVID death; nothing about COVID's behavior in the population could be usefully addressed in order to prevent the crash death. The other is a wide range of "died while experiencing COVID symptoms that were anything from relatively mild to frighteningly awful, and therefore on average would have killed people on a scale of only someone who already had one foot in the grave and another on a banana peel, to someone of rather ordinary health and vigor who just drew the short straw." Public health policy could have something useful to say about anyone along the entire spectrum of the second group. One would hope we could adjust the policy to take account of people on one extreme or the other, but so far no. Left to our own devices, the great bulk of people probably would have self-sorted so that the most vulnerable hunkered down the most extremely, especially if they'd consistently received information and advice that could be attempted to be taken seriously. Some naturally would have made poor choices.
Contagious diseases do pose unusually difficult questions. It's one thing to issue Darwin awards to people who destroy their health in one of the many ways available to us, but the picture changes if their dangerous choices can infect their neighbors and spread like wildfire. Quarantine has been a social response to this problem for a long time, and human beings haven't always been particularly kind or rational about it, often opting for brutal caution and simplicity instead.
On the other hand, once it becomes clear that the infection is pretty much going to rip through the population whatever we do, we ought to be re-thinking what we can usefully do about it. I never did believe it was likely we could improve on the initial hope that slowing the spread might ease the strain on hospitals, to give us time to develop strategies for rapidly redeploying resources as surges hit one location after another. Instead we drifted into an idea that a variety of mitigation measures, if made more and more extreme and calibrated with increasingly complex statutory regimens and formulas, could prevent the disease entirely, along the lines of an Ebola outbreak. Mitigation measures threatened to morph entirely into a combination of political theater and superstitious talismans. The only point of many policies seems to be to address feelings of panic--though ironically often exacerbating them--or create legal or political cover.
Pushing back against any of this invites the accusation of either obliviousness or heartlessness--just as people will accuse you of heartlessness about the awful disease of cancer if you fail to buy into any of 1,000 theories about how to avoid it by personal or social measures. But cancer, at least, isn't contagious, it doesn't invade the public in terrifying quick waves, so we can think more clearly about it, even though it's typically a much, much worse disease than COVID for all but the tiniest fraction of very unlucky people.
HIV was an early example of how our current problems might have been spurred by bad policy. My guess is that we got control of ourselves largely because it became clear that most of us could avoid intimate contact with the mostly likely sources of the disease. As bad as the fear was, it was nothing like imagining that everyone within six feet of us could kill us in 10 days. Panic on that level comes right out of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers."
Our local newspaper editor and his wife both came down with what I assume was the typical Omicron variant a couple of weeks ago. It was just as usually advertised: fever, sore threat, fatigue, and general aches for about 4 days. They're both perhaps 60 years old and reasonably fit. They had just finished visiting elderly relatives and were terrified they'd passed it on, but apparently not.
HIV was an early example of how our current problems might have been spurred by bad policy. My guess is that we got control of ourselves largely because it became clear that most of us could avoid intimate contact with the mostly likely sources of the disease.
Since I can't comment without frothing at the mouth over Dr. Fauci's mishandling of that early problem, I will just say Tex's analysis, above, makes sense.
This is a very well written letter in response to the WA threat to impose mandatory jabs. Includes some of the info I have been looking at over the last two years.
https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/letter-to-the-washington-state-board
That works out, if the Sobbing Doomsayer's claim can be taken seriously, of around 105,000 without comorbidities dying of/with the Wuhan Virus annually.
Actually, that's 105,000 with 0 to 3 comorbidities. Probably quite a few of those 105,000 had at least 1 comorbidity.
The of/with distinction is artificial and should have been dropped long ago. We have a million excess deaths, with no other cause accounting for more than a few percent. ... To find it significant that those people might not be dead without other causes added in is not something recognised in death statistics anywhere else. It has been made up for this occasion.
I wonder if part of Hines's & AVI's disconnect is conflicting purposes. AVI seems right about the statement I quoted above, but what's the point of keeping statistics this way? Isn't it to provide a large-scale viewpoint on a population in order to shape health policy going forward? And what is Hines's point about the of/with distinction? Isn't it more to provide individuals with tools for their own private risk analysis?
These broad death statistics aren't terribly meaningful for an individual trying to make health decisions. For me, the of / with distinction and knowing about how comorbidities affect the course of COVID is important for understanding my own risks regarding COVID and making my own health choices. I can't make decisions for the mass of Americans, so the common method of keeping death statistics and their policy guiding purpose don't seem all that useful in making my personal health decisions.
On the other hand, I'm sure the way death statistics are kept, including not caring about the of/with distinction, is meaningful for people interested in shaping broad health policies for the nation.
It's kind of like BMI. It's worse than useless for many individuals (e.g., weightlifters), but meaningful for large populations.
This is one of the reasons why I put up my hands when the more libertarian members here say that we can trust people to make good decisions on their own.
As one of the more libertarian members of the Hall, I'd like to say I never said we can trust people to make good decisions on their own. What I say is that we can't trust anyone else to make good decisions for the individual.
There are a number of reasons for this. The first, of course, is that individual values differ greatly. A civil engineer can tell me how to build a bridge across my creek, but what if I don't want a bridge across my creek? The same goes for health; my health values are not necessarily those of the medical experts I have access to. The second reason is that humanity is pretty ignorant. We have civil engineering nailed down pretty well, but health and the social sciences are hardly settled affairs. Third, experts are corruptible. They may not care about the individuals they advise nearly as much as personal wealth, reputation, power, etc.
So I don't think individuals will make the best decisions for themselves, but I am extremely skeptical that anyone else will either, and so I would leave it to the individual to destroy himself through his own bad decisions rather than enslave him under others who will just as surely destroy him through theirs.
I never said we can trust people to make good decisions on their own. What I say is that we can't trust anyone else to make good decisions for the individual.
There are two ways in which that is true, too: that they lack the pespective and information to judge, and also that those judging from On High aren't actually interested in the individual any more. They're happy to say, "Look, we accept that a certain number of you will die from doing what we say; but we judge that to be a lesser evil for the community as a whole compared to the alternative." Electing to be sacrificed for the good of the whole may be noble, but being chosen as an acceptable loss is dehumanizing.
Some info on the vaccines and Omicron:
https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20220105/hospitalization-omicron-delta
The 75% mortality rate for those with 4 comorbidities is among the vaccinated.
Among 1,228,664 persons who completed primary vaccination during December 2020–October 2021, severe COVID-19–associated outcomes (0.015%) or death (0.0033%) were rare. Risk factors for severe outcomes included age ≥65 years, immunosuppressed, and six other underlying conditions. All persons with severe outcomes had at least one risk factor; 78% of persons who died had at least four.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7101a4.htm#contribAff
(Via: https://hotair.com/allahpundit/2022/01/10/no-the-cdc-chief-didnt-say-that-75-of-all-covid-deaths-involved-four-comorbidities-n440544)
Elise
Thanks, Elise. I'll update the original post.
Elise..."The 75% mortality rate for those with 4 comorbidities is among the vaccinated"
Very significant point. The obvious question is, what is the relationship between mortality and comorbidities among the unvaccinated population? I don't see that analysis at the CDC link.
CDC seems to present data in response to particular questions or situations or points it is trying to make, but I would have liked to see more data presented on obviously-important questions like the above. Where, for example, is the table showing various comorbidity factors (including age) as rows, and various vax statuses as columns, with the intersections showing death and hospitalization rates for the various combinations? Seems very obvious to me that something like this should be created and displayed.
On my part, that was an embarrassing mistake. I got my initial info from the Federalist, which I generally trust, but I guess I trusted too much.
Every source I saw reporting this made the same mistake initially, so if you didn't actually read the interview itself you have not done worse than others. The information is coherent with what we've heard all along, in any case; I remember the number was 2.9 at one point pre-vaccine. If that data held -- which, frankly, we have no idea if it did since this is also pre-Delta and pre-Omicron -- then then vaccines increase the number of comorbidities associated with death by approximately one.
Here's the older data.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/health_policy/covid19-comorbidity-expanded-12092020-508.pdf
cause the waxxines were causing the comorbidities obviously.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/01/people_are_dying_but_not_the_ones_you_think_for_the_reasons_you_think.html
Here are the insurance actuarial table stats going back 147 years.
The key was to never use the CDC/death doctor data. Those are always doctored.
There was always going to be other data stats, from people economically interested in verifying who died and from what.
These are the real stats.
40%.
That's the progress of humanity's enforced mandatory genetic slavery "experiments" Mengele style. Be proud. As Soddom was proud.
I saw the Waxxines in concert once. They opened for Wasculature, but by that time their career was vaning.
Grim, thanks for the early numbers. It's interesting that at that point, only 6% died with COVID alone.
Yes, I found the "with vaccines" info only because I was looking for info on how many died with 1 comorbidity, with 2, etc. I am disappointed in The Federalist as well - I expect them to be accurate. As Grim says, however, pretty much everyone presented Walensky's remarks the same way which makes it difficult to sort out truth from fiction - or, as people seem to say now, truth from info that confirms my priors.
Elise
One of my problems with the co-morbidity statistics is that few people make it to 65, let alone 75, without at least one co-morbidity. Before I found it very helpful personally, I guess I'd have to know how serious the co-morbidity had to be. A little overweight? Circus-fat? Really crazy uncontrolled hypertension or diabetes? A little concern about heart health or looking at your third stent operation? If 90% of people 65 and above trip the wire for at least one co-morbidity, it's not adding much information, though it's great news for the elderly in superb health. At least it would seem to indicate that their aging immune systems are not inevitably incapable of dealing with a pathogen, just that the overall system can be seriously weakened by these many age-related diseases.
PS, I heartily endorse both of Tom's comments above.
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