Dr. Deborah Birx Whitehouse Covid-19 Task Force Coordinator:
“So, I think in this country we’ve taken a very liberal approach to mortality. And I think the reporting here has been pretty straightforward over the last five to six weeks. Prior to that when there wasn’t testing in January and February that’s a very different situation and unknown.
There are other countries that if you had a preexisting condition and let’s say the virus caused you to go to the ICU and then have a heart or kidney problem some countries are recording that as a heart issue or a kidney issue and not a COVID-19 death. Right now we are still recording it and we will I mean the great thing about having forms that come in and a form that has the ability to mark it as COVID-19 infection the intent is right now that those if someone dies with COVID-19 we are counting that as a COVID-19 death.”
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/04/08/dr_birx_unlike_some_countries_if_someone_dies_with_covid-19_we_are_counting_that_as_a_covid-19_death.html
That quote is discussed here.
This video from John Campbell Global situation today - YouTube
talks about the situation in Russia, and paints a very grim picture. But not one that is inconsistent with the OP. He discusses deaths, not diagnosed infections. The basic issue is that there appears to be significant pressure and structural issues suppressing reporting deaths as due to Covid-19. So the CFR looks extremely low. Putin has even been suggesting that Russian medicine is much superior and accounts for this low CFR.
Cynically one could observe that if there is a deliberate intent to make the impression in the populace that the infection numbers are inflated, yet the published death numbers are low, the population will believe that the situation is not serious. Which is one tactic for making a government look good. Indeed it is a brilliant way of exploiting a natural tendency in the populace to look for conspiracies.
In context it sounds like Dr. Blix is concerned about the ways deaths are counted, but not a big concern about that those items are inflating the numbers, if anything a later report did find even Fauci agreeing that the numbers are not inflated, but that under counts are still more likely.
I’ve been downloading the raw data every week, and one thing I have to point out is that many of the states are way behind in reporting. For example, as of last week, Connecticut had just started reporting February deaths, and even those were incomplete. That said, in Massachusetts the excess “all causes” deaths excess value over the last six years’ average almost exactly matches the Covid deaths reported by the state.
Does this mean that CT is backed up three whole months, or that they’ve reported on March forward and are now backfilling February?
But what does Ann Coulter say? Bozo the Clown? Have we asked the Kremlin or North Korea’s intelligence service what they think?
Many deaths are reported weeks late.
Arithmetic to the rescue! Here’s data from the linked table, with two columns added by me. 1st column is week-ending date, 2nd covid-9 deaths, 3rd total deaths, 4th “percent of expected deaths”, 5th expected deaths (deduced from columns #3 and #4), 6th excess deaths (column #3 minus #5).
(You may need to disable Sultanbugs in the lower-left of the page to view this table.)
Total Deaths 81372 971879 102 952823 19056
2/1/2020 0 57627 97 59409 -1782
2/8/2020 1 58278 98 59467 -1189
2/15/2020 0 57616 98 58792 -1176
2/22/2020 2 57688 99 58277 -583
2/29/2020 5 58020 101 57446 574
3/7/2020 32 57793 100 57793 0
3/14/2020 51 56572 99 57143 -571
3/21/2020 539 57062 101 56497 565
3/28/2020 2997 60766 109 55749 5017
4/4/2020 9345 68936 124 55594 13342
4/11/2020 15320 74510 135 55193 19317
4/18/2020 15739 71120 132 53879 17241
4/25/2020 13146 66216 123 53834 12382
5/2/2020 10202 59920 112 53500 6420
Deaths were lower than expected in February. Was the winter mild? Or is this just due to lateness in reporting deaths? (The same lateness renders the 1st row of the table almost useless.)
For 4/4/2020 there were 9k covid deaths and 13k excess deaths; for 4/11/2020 15k and 19k. If anything, the data suggest that there were thousands of deaths each week in the April peak that were due to covid-19 but not reported as such. (Moreover, the crisis may have exacerbated the lateness of reporting deaths unascribed to covid-19.)
I don’t know anything about the specific numbers, but it is (of course) true that hospitals get paid more for COVID patients than similarly situated non-COVID patients. There is a 20% Medicare reimbursement bump for COVID cases under the CARES Act and (perhaps more importantly) HHS is providing payment (at the higher Medicare rates) for treatment of uninsured patients with a COVID diagnosis.
For example, from USAToday’s Fact Check of Jensen’s claim:
And from Factcheck.org:
I don’t know if this is happening. (Although, of course, upcoding is a common type of health care fraud/“mistake”). But, as far as I can tell, Jensen’s factual claim appears to be correct.
It means they are backed up three whole months. And to be clear, I don’t mean backed up on coronavirus reporting, I mean backed up on reporting on any kind of deaths to the CDC.
Can we see those cites, please?
Those stats are for February 2020 to October 2020. Also from your cite:
“From March to June 2020, there were 4,476 deaths involving COVID-19 with no pre-existing conditions in England and Wales.”
Really??
You misquoted statistics, and that proves you right? Tell me-What exactly would it take to prove you wrong?
Well…Yeah??
- If you have proven it beyond a reasonable doubt, why would I then need to do any “acctual reaserch”?
- There is that vague term “main stream media”-What news media do you trust?
Pro-tip:
Looking a some crackpot conspiracy theory youtube videos, and being apparently unable to understand basic numbers does not constitute “research”
“They” are most decidedly NOT " putting covid (sic) on all death certificates in the UK within 28 days of having a possitve (sic) test,". This is complete, unadulterated bullshit that you are simply repeating from a bullshit source.
Many folks here have also “been around the block and seen a thing or two”. Your opinion of yourself seems to be overly high.
From your source:
"There are 2 definitions of a death in a person with COVID-19 in England, one
broader measure and one measure reflecting current trends:
“1) A death in a person with a laboratory-confirmed positive COVID-19 test and
either died within 60 days of the first specimen date or died more than 60 days
after the first specimen date, only if COVID-19 is mentioned on the death
certificate
2) A death in a person with a laboratory-confirmed positive COVID-19 test and
died within (equal to or less than) 28 days of the first positive specimen date”
Nothing in there about a previous “no time limit”, and nothing in there about requiring Covid-19 to be on the death certificate.
In most countries (I think including the US), there is a primary cause of death listed on a death certificate and N secondary causes. It would be absolutely appropriate and normal to mention covid as a secondary cause of death, being as it is fatal to a significant proportion of the demographic that presumably her mother belongs to.
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Regarding the OP, I would be very skeptical until we see hard evidence. I’ve worked in hospitals in the UK and China, and IME it’s not very plausible. Screwing with patients’ diagnoses would be considered unthinkable and anyway is many layers removed from the people making decisions about funding.
Yes there are book-keeping tricks that can be utilized to try to tease out more funding, but this isn’t one of them.
Yeah if anything, I would think that Putin is encouraging hospitals and health officials to deflate the numbers. A pandemic is the kind of national crisis that could lead to an uprising. Not saying it will, just saying it could (see Brazil v Bolsonaro) if it is ignored.