I took a nice vacation to Punta Cana by myself at the end of February. It was perfect timing, as the first major stock market collapse occurred during my flight back. Anyway, I met this very nice newlywed Russian couple from the Krasnodar/Sochi region and we became very good friends. We’ve been communicating just about every day, so I have a good sense of how COVID and its impact on best practices, conventional wisdom, etc. have evolved over in Russia.
Knowing that I live and work in the NYC area. My friends were obviously concerned about my safety. While Russia implemented lockdown and quarantine practices around the same time as us, the spread of the disease was not nearly as prevalent (as far as we know; perhaps it was due to testing differences). Anyway, over the last week, Russia’s numbers have started growing exponentially. So, of course, I expressed my concerns to my Russian friends.
My friend responded that the numbers are all BS. Apparently, hospitals are over-reporting cases all over Russia to get more federal funding. My friend mentioned that one of his friends went to the hospital with a broken nose and came out with a COVID diagnosis. And this was without a test being taken. But this is of course anecdotal, but makes at least some sense if there is funding involved.
By the way, my friend had an interesting comment: “Over here, one class of citizens washes their hands, and the other class washes money”. Judging by the cars that my friends drive, and the lifestyle they live, I assumed that they fall into the latter class. So I asked my friend which class he falls in. His response: “I wash my hands with the money.” :D.
I guess the answer to your question lies in which States or countries get government* funding for an increase in cases. Since I don’t know any, I don’t know where it happens.
That doesn’t make any sense. Putin obviously doesn’t want to see an increase in COVID cases. And if you go against Putin in Russia, you don’t get additional funding, you fall out of a window.
A couple of people from my high school posted on Facebook about how there is a strong financial incentive for hospitals to label patients with COVID because… reasons. This is based on someone spewing crap about the subject (and that person, on followup, said he had no reason to believe there were fraudulent diagnoses). Someone else addressed that question and explained the whole payment for x diagnosis thing, in a very reasonable manner.
I asked this classmate “do you have any cites saying this has happened?”
Her very well-thought-out response was, pretty much verbatim: “I don’t care. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire”.
And someone else responded to her with hysteria about how since the hospitals are getting paid so much more if they put a patient in a ventilator, they are overusing them EVEN THOUGH THEY DON’T HELP. Then went onto hysterical ranting about her mother’s recent death (due to a stroke) and how she was going to take legal action if her mother got a COVID diagnosis on her death certificate. As it happens, her mother DID test positive for it, but that was likely a contributing factor at most. It’s not clear to me what the grounds would be for legal action, but I’m sure she Has Her Reasons.
So if these two “well-educated” people are to be believed, yes, hospitals are grossly overinflating the statistics.
Apparently, not everyone from that high school was terribly intelligent despite the evidence of Yours Truly. (hey, quit laughing!)
I have no particular reason to believe that you and I know any of the same people, but I saw an almost identical Facebook post just yesterday. Somebody “knew a woman” whose mother died from “another reason” (they didn’t say what), but the hospital totally put COVID on the death certificate, and the family was totally going to sue!
It must be the latest craze, lawsuits over fake COVID diagnoses. :smack:
An interesting statistic to look at is deaths from all causes. The U.S. has close to 1,000,000 deaths this year from all causes. 2% higher than normal yet covid cases are listed at 100,000 which would put it at 10% above normal. My first thought is that a lot of folks dying from covid were dying anyway just a week or two sooner. I wonder how many cases where covid good rightfully be listed as a contributing cause are listed as covid deaths.
If I am understanding you correctly, you are saying that the death count of COVID and the excess deaths are not matching up. However, if you go to the CDC excess deaths site (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm), it has a downloadable CSV data file that lists the excess death in the US as of 9 May. It lists 2020 excess deaths lower bound as 84,891 and the upper bound as 113,139.
This is higher than the official death count as of 9 May (~80K).
So that says to me that the COVID deaths are likely being under-reported or we have more COVID-fear related deaths because of people afraid to get other health treatments.
If I’m, looking at the CDC graph correctly*, since 2017 deaths from all causes has average 50,000-60,000 per week in a fairly regular cycle (peak in Dec.-Jan., trough in late summer.) That would make the average more like 2.5 million per year. The bump in deaths since April is far higher than what would be expected from people dying “just a week or two sooner.”
*As always, when I say something that depends on reading numbers correctly, I invite someone who actually understands numbers to double-check me.
Huh. So we have rumors that mirror each other both in the US and Russia. Imagine that.
The US version isn’t hard to trace.
Fox News interviewed a GOP Minnesota state senator named Scott Jensen. Jensen claimed Medicare paid hospitals $13,000 for each patient listed as having COVID and $39,000 for each one put on a ventilator. The interview launched a lot of memes, and people wanting desperately to believe this whole COVID thing is over-hyped or a hoax latched onto it. From Snopes:
And of course, QAnon and InfoWars were all over this. From theStar-Tribune:
Ah, now I understand what you’re talking about. That number includes the totals for the last two weeks, for which the data is incomplete. Notice that the week of 5/16 shows 77% and 5/23 shows 29%.
It would help if you look at that percentage for each individual week. From 2/1 to 3/21 we see it between 97% and 101% of expected, then compare that to each week thereafter.
Missed the edit window. If we assume the last two weeks eventually total 100% of expected deaths, that will make the total for 2/1 through 5/23 to be 113% of expected deaths.