In NY, it’s all COVID, all the time
Some NY area funeral directors are saying that all the deaths are being ascribed to COVID:
“Basically, every death certificate that comes across our desk now has COVID on it,” said a funeral director in Williston Park, N.Y. [in greater NYC], on a recorded phone call with Project Veritas in a newly-released video. James O’Keefe has been asking for people inside the medical system to blow the whistle if they see corruption or inconsistencies in reports about the Chinese WuFlu known as COVID-19. In conversations with several funeral directors across New York City, O’Keefe uncovered a shocking narrative where, without fail, every director he spoke to expressed his or her concern that coronavirus deaths are being inflated and every death in NYC is being recorded as a COVID death with or without testing to confirm.
The CDC directives are only to assume it’s COVID if there’s good reason to assume it. But in practical terms, the decision is up to those who fill out the certificates. If they have reason to over-diagnose COVID – whether it be for reimbursement purposes, political strategies, or other reasons – they will do so. That means, of course, that the COVID death statistics at this point are highly suspect.
Looking at excess death statistics over the usual for the past few months would be more valid. But there are problems with those numbers, too. For example, if people are otherwise neglecting their health (and for the most part it makes sense to believe that they are), then other types of deaths would be up and would be part of the excess death numbers but would not be due to COVID. If EMTs are told not to spend much time or effort reviving victims of cardiac arrest, that’s another type of non-COVID death that would be higher. Stress can cause death, too, in a susceptible individual. And 2019-2020 was already a supposedly worse-than-average flu season before COVID hit. What happened to those flu deaths? Did they suddenly disappear, or are they part of the excess death figure that is being routinely misdiagnosed as COVID?
I’m now politically motivated to never die.
Cold comfort never felt so warm inside.
Outside of NY & NJ, the US is doing quite well, but overwhelmingly our media are located in the middle of the worst hot spot in the world. Coverage would be very different if they were based in Cleveland.
Deaths/Million of population:
NY(S) = 941.8
NJ = 901.7
UK = 394.4
France = 373.4
Sweden = 256.1
All US States = 190.4
Europe (all, not EU only) = 180.1
Switzerland = 164.3
US outside NY = 113.5
US outside NY&NJ = 92.8
Canada = 84.4
Denmark = 78.0
Germany = 75.1
South Korea = 4.8
Japan = 3.4
(data from OurWorldInData and CovidTracking)
As commenter physicsguy found when he was running his admirable regression analyses, once the CDC encouraged people to fiddle with the data, it became more and more difficult to make sense of it. No doubt a whole lot of deaths have been COVID, but also, a fair number of them have not.
Well our dumbass governor in Washington just extended the lockdown until May 31 with a bunch nonsensical, non specific possible outs for some counties. He basically is using Trump’s plan without any specifics I guess.
Of course, my county will never ask for any of these. This entire thing is the most outrageous episode in US history.
We are rapidly reaching a point where widespread civil disobedience may be the only hope we have.
Griffin:
Before this fiasco and panic King Jay’s lunacy could mostly be ignored, no more. It would seem his hubris and megalomania will destroy the state. Governor Ratched of MI seems to be worse, but the Michiganders are at least resisting her, WA, not so much.
It is scary that the progs wanted to give King Jay sweeping executive powers to address the “threat” of climate change. What could go wrong with that?
om,
Yes, before this I was basically ‘he’s an idiot but what do you expect from this state’ but now he is a real threat to this state’s future and he can’t even articulate his reasons or how we get out of this he just meanders along talking about parachutes and other garbage.
I don’t see how there will be many small non chain restaurants in the major counties in this state by May 31 and the same with thousands of others. Without Amazon and Microsoft this state would be a complete disaster area and of course some want to come for them too.
Griffin & om: I’m in Vancouver WA and have been merrily going to work every day since the beginning. No one has batted an eye, looked at me (or my coworkers) askance, asked any questions, etc.
It’s true in a building with 6 businesses ours is the only one consistently operating. There is a dentist office that opens on occasion for an emergency procedure, but that’s it. There’s an architectural firm, real estate, and health insurance all have been closed since the beginning of the shut down order.
I see more and more people on the roads each morning and afternoon on my drive to and from work, however. Maybe we’re far enough removed from Inslee down here!
Why not label all deaths as orangemanbad? Because that is exactly what this panic is all about.
gwynmir,
Yes, I live in the Tacoma area and the amount of traffic has noticeably increased the last week or so. I have also heard of more businesses operating on the down low by having customers enter through the back or something like that. I know a woman who has been doing hair in her kitchen because her salon is closed.
These are becoming our version of the speakeasy I guess.
Speaking of COVID deaths in NY, I’ve been watching some more MedCram videos (updates 60 – 65). Dr. Sehault had some really grim statistics.
From Mar. 1 through Apr. 4, there were 5,700 COVID patients admitted to NYC hospitals. Of those: 20% who were under age 65 and never went on a ventilator died; 27% who were over 65 and never vented died; 75% under 65 who were vented died; and a whopping 97% of those over 65 who were vented died. It would only be modest hyperbole to say that the ventilator is a kiss of death. Of course, how the ventilator is used matters a great deal, and only the sickest get the vent.
Here is the link. Stats. near the end.
Dr. Sehault has a ton of info. on the various ways in which the virus attacks the body. One newer issue is that once the virus enters the blood stream it attacks the thin endothelial cells lining the interior of the blood vessels. As they are destroyed an excess of biochemicals (Factor VIII and Factor X) are released into the blood which immediately begins to clot the blood which can lead to heart attacks and strokes.
He implies, but does not exactly state, that somehow this also leads to a type of ARDS that gives the lungs a very low elastic stiffness and perhaps makes them susceptible to overpressure damage from a ventilator. (The latter material is in the other MedCram videos.)
TommyJay:
Unless ventilators are randomly assigned – and of course they’re not – those ventilator statistics mean nothing.
However, I have seen some doctors reporting that in patients who are all struggling to breathe, ventilators should only be a last resort and that high flow nasal cannula oxygen can be a better bet.
Come on Neo. At 97% fatality for the over 65 group one must seriously question the exact nature of the treatment. Remember “do no harm”?
Griffin,
I’m in Pittsburgh (most of PA is still under stay-at-home orders) and I’ve noticed that the traffic has been steadily increasing each day. Honestly, with the exception of heavy rush hour traffic, it feels like the traffic is back to pre-shutdown levels. Stores that remained open are getting more and more crowded (though most people do seem to be following the face mask guidelines).
My state of Oklahoma is doing a slow reopening. But, expect the number of cases to increase a lot, but not from the reopening. Of course, the media will misrepresent the situation.
The state will be using the saliva test to survey the 42,000 patients and staff in all nursing/LTC facilities since it is easier for older patients to tolerate spitting vs the deep nasal swab. The National Guard has a special decom team and they are working their way through the nursing homes. I think they’ll be testing the various prisons later. And, since there are enough tests & labs, the restrictions on testing has eased up – no need to have specific symptoms to get a test.
The various reports on the state Covid 19 site https://coronavirus.health.ok.gov/ indicate that most of the deaths are white (77%), age 65+ (80%) which increases to 95% when you add in 50+, with males at 53%. About 22% of cases are patients or staff at LTC facilities and 40% of the deaths are related to the LTC centers. It’s interesting to check the site every day since they seem to find something else to track, graph and report.
Liz, that Oklahoma plan to identify nursing home/LTC patients, I assume segregate them while they are treated, and decontaminate the buildings so the non-COVID residents will not get it is very sensible. I wish we were doing something similar here in NC, where over half the deaths are in “congregate living facilities.”
Kate –
From what I can determine from news reports, the very sick were taken to hospitals. One news report stated – “We are working closely with nursing homes to ensure that every precaution is being taken to ensure spread of COVID is mitigated and those residents that test positive are isolated as their status is confirmed. If a staff member in a facility becomes symptomatic, they are quickly removed from contact with residents and staff.”
I think the NG cleaning the LTC centers is based on requests by the county or center so they might be helping the smaller places that don’t have a lot of $$ or help. One article I read mentioned that the NG is also helping with the various mobile testing sites in dealing with traffic. And, they are helping with the distribution of PPE as the state supply increases.
Every time I look at the daily ExecOrder report, the list of labs doing tests is increasing. The various tribes are reporting their availability and they are holding testing sites, available for anyone and not restricted to a tribe member. It is interesting to see what the limiting factors are since they are required to report those factors. There are even listings of PPE by county as well as what is in the state reserve. So, I am comfortable that the state will be able to react to any sudden increases. They are hiring people for contact tracing.
I hope that all states are as open with the information as OK seems to be. Keep healthy!
Oh – and even though OK is opening for business, there are still restrictions and most of my friends are still being careful. I’m keeping my daily journal of temp/O2/BP along with travel contacts. My last general travel was on the 23rd to bank, garden center, food drive through, liquor store. Strange that I’ve been to the liquor store before I went to grocery store, but I am still working off my freezer and pantry. Unfortunately, I found vanilla beans and used up my vodka to make vanilla extract.
And, a Norman OK company has developed an antibody test and they are expanding local sites to take the blood sample. I’ll be going soon since a friend was very sick with “flu” and now thinks he had C19. I wasn’t concerned until they came out with new symptoms of chills & headaches. Yup, I had those for a few days after my meeting with the guy. Grrr…. But, if I have the antibodies, then I can wait on the vaccine and save the dose for someone else.
Major hospitals around the country are furloughing or outright firing doctors and nurses because there is no work to be done save for the handful of covid patients (or patients they are treating as covid patients). The hospitals are all waiting for the surge that will never happen.
Meanwhile, important surgeries and treatments for non-covid patients are being put off, often with disastrous results. One of my in-laws has breast cancer and had developed a small stress fracture in her femur. She was scheduled for prophylactic fixation of her femur (to prevent a disastrous fracture through the whole bone), but it was put off indefinitely as the hospital waited for the “surge” to hit. In the meantime, she ended up severely breaking the bone through and through not from any physical exertion or even walking (she was restricted to a wheelchair due to the risk involved), but by simply rolling over in bed the wrong way. Now because of this catastrophic fracture that would have been prevented with a surgery a month and a half ago, she needs a complicated surgery which will cause significant debilitation and need significant rehabilitation. But, to add insult to injury, physical therapy and rehab has been shut down everywhere in the state as a “non-essential” service, so she may never properly recover mobility in a timely fashion. At the same time, if she were to die during surgery, I’m sure her death would be attributed to covid in order to cook the books and justify the medical mismanagement of her case and hundreds/thousands of others while they throw their doors open and vigorously treat everyone showing up with mere sniffles.
Forget deaths from seasonal flu amazingly becoming nonexistent during this “crisis”, I want to see if there is a miraculous drop in deaths attributed to things like cancer during this same period.
BREAKING: Funeral Directors in COVID-19 Epicenter Doubt Legitimacy of Deaths Attributed to Pandemic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=g5f_6ltv7oI&feature=emb_logo
ICYMI – every death is due to COVID, even this one.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EVCo-RPX0AUVTg4?format=jpg&name=900×900
I ventured out to Haggens today to pick up their fish and chips for our evening meal. Wow! The place was packed. Hardly any customers were wearing face masks. It looked a bit like the denizens of Snohomish County have decided that the emergency is over. I guess maybe Sheriff Fortney’s anti-enforcement pledge has had an effect. Anyway, except that many stores are still closed, it appears that many citizens are now convinced that it’s safe. I want to believe they’re right, but at 87, will continue to play it safe.
15 new cases on 4/26, but blipped up to 50 new cases on 4/29 and now back down to 21 new cases today. Some experts that Laura Ingraham talks to say the virus is getting weaker as the weather gets warmer. The hospitalization numbers here seem to bear that out. The number of people being treated/isolated at home has risen steadily to over 500 now and the number being treated in the hospital has declined steadily from over 150 in early April to 66 today. That warm weather will weaken/shut down the rapid infection and severity is an outcome to be fervently desired.
TommyJay, you’re wrong to assume ventilators are killing those people.
You can’t say that based solely (as you are) on the fact that more people who get ventilated die as compared to people that don’t.
Most of those on ventilators are more severe cases who would have died anyway, ventilators or no.
But your numbers don’t tell you that because you’re not understanding what the numbers mean.
Headline:
NEW YORK (WABC) — New York state’s COVID-19 cases are down slightly in a promising sign, but the death toll remains “terrifyingly high” at 299 on Friday, an uptick of 10 from the day before, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Saturday.
Will someone please tell our wonderful governor that “299 deaths” is the same as New York State’s average daily abortion rate.
Yes, I agree, it is terrifyingly high but why don’t you show the same level of concern for the unborn??
When a hospital has a choice of being reimbursed at a Medicare rate or at a Medicaid rate, designating any death tangentially related to Covid-19 to the same is a no brainer.
A week or so ago Boeing announced it was restarting production in its Seattle-area plants, and Governor Inslee didn’t say squat. Everyone else seems to be following his orders like good little sheep.
Griffin —
I’m not so annoyed at the structure of the WA reopening plan as its indefiniteness.
I would rather he combined Stage 1 (non-essential businesses can reopen, basically) with Stage 2 (people are free to move about and gather in small numbers). But what gets me is the paternalism of the whole thing: if we’re very very good and don’t get any demerits, maybe he’ll let us move on to the next stage after a minimum — but don’t get your hopes up! — of three weeks.
I would much rather the opposite: we’ll reopen on such and such a schedule unless there’s very good evidence not to.
Also, it’s really hard to read this Seattle Times article and not get the impression that the State is hostile to the very idea of antibody testing. What don’t they want to know, or want us to know?
Bryan,
I think it’s a combination of the open ended vagueness of the plan combined with the mind boggling inconsistency of it all. Want to buy a shirt at Walmart? Sure! Want to buy a shirt at Old Navy? No way! Want to buy a flat screen TV at Target? Sure! Want to buy a flat screen TV at Best Buy? No sirree!
It will be around two months by the end of May. Frankly I can think of no situation that merits that. It is truly insane.
And don’t get me started on the ban on camping.
neo —
You wanted some numbers on chance of dying by age group.
WA State Public Health has published a breakdown of cases and deaths by age:
0-19: 4% of cases, 0% of deaths
20-39: 29% of cases, 1% of deaths
40-59: 34% of cases, 8% of deaths
60-79: 23% of cases, 38% of deaths
80+: 10% of cases, 53% of deaths
Since we know that officially there are 14,637 cases and 824 deaths as of 4/30, then multiplying out gives us:
0-19: 0% of cases die
20-39: 0.2% of cases die
40-59: 1.3% of cases die
60-79: 9.3% of cases die
80+: 29.8% of cases die
And I would bet that for the 20-39 and 40-59 brackets almost all of the deaths had underlying factors.
I’m 54 and in good health — not obese, don’t smoke, not diabetic, take lots of Vitamin D — so I have very little fear of getting the virus (if I didn’t have it already), because I suspect my chance of death is down around 0.01%.
And I promise to stay far away from my 75-year-old neighbor, okay?
But apparently this all means I just want people to die.
“Cases” in the above WA statistics is literally equal to “positive tests” according to the web page, and considering the difficulty of getting a test at all, I think we can assume that there are a vast number of infections in the younger demographics that never got sick enough to get a test, or couldn’t get their doctor to order one. So the chance of death percentages are probably way high.
Bryan Lovely at 4:08 pm asked: “Also, it’s really hard to read this Seattle Times article and not get the impression that the State is hostile to the very idea of antibody testing. What don’t they want to know, or want us to know?”
Aside from the test’s unreliability, I wonder if there is a general fear that we’re careening headlong into a two-tier society: people with enough / “good” antibodies get to work and play unfettered, while people with insufficient / “defective” antibodies* are required to socially distance and don masks.
It’s too hyperbolic to liken it to Jews wearing yellow Stars of David, but can I liken it to walking around in deep brown skin instead of in whitish, pinkish skin? We humans sure can come up with all manner of ways to hold ourselves different from, if not superior to, the other guy.
* (I don’t know whether there are “good” or “defective” antibodies — I’m no M.D. — but I do know there are “good” and “bad cholesterol and “good” and “bad” bacteria, so I’m just waiting with baited breath for the M.D. cognoscenti to decide down the road that there are “good” and “bad” antibodies regarding covid, or any virus for that matter.)
M J R,
If I remember right I believe our all knowing God of Science Fauci pretty much floated this idea a few weeks ago.
You’d have to show your papers.
Nut job!
Comes now another article from the Seattle Times reporting on several different groups’ estimates and modeling from testing surveys that the rate of infections is around 7 times the official number of “cases” (which means that the IFR is that much lower than the CFR).
So good news! Your chance of dying if you’re not very old just went from small to negligible!
And if it’s in the Seattle Times, that means our state government has to take notice of it, right?
Griffin (at 5:17 pm), I did not know that! Am I surprised? Nah.
it’s really hard to read this Seattle Times article and not get the impression that the State is hostile to the very idea of antibody testing. What don’t they want to know, or want us to know?”
that its not much worse than the flu
that many of the flu deaths are categorized as covid
and thats why they disappeared along with other conditions deaths
that the numbers are inflated and they been punking their people
I have a sibling who resides in NYC, Manhattan to be exact. Today we were exchanging texts. Due to good weather, he said there was a good number of people in Central Park without masks with no police in sight. When he went grocery there was a group of people of who flooded out of the elevator in Trader’s Joe. In my own city, about a week ago, a friend recalled seeing groups of people in his local neighborhood park either sunbathing or playing contact sports.
In both cities, in the neighborhoods with the most transplants and relative to downtown, they bang pots and pans, flash their lights, and make noise with other household items, as a way to honor the healthcare workers as they change shifts. It’s all virtue signaling and means very little.
Stress as a proximate (initiating) cause of death applies only to those rare persons who already have an underlying propensity for certain abnormal heart rhythms. In short, people with a pre-existing cardiac condition, even if undiagnosed. The huge majority of those rhythm disturbances are not fatal when they occur, and are correctable. The medical literature is not replete with evidence that stress causes death.
Stress is vastly exaggerated in our society. It is a form of justification for self-pity and inaction. “It will stress me out” is an appallingly common plaint. But the mental health people love it: It’s not your fault, it is stress; dispense more Xanax! Prayer, an appeal for God’s guidance, and just doing the right thing (which people know but refuse to do) are never mentioned.
Bryan:
The SCAN report says, “Since March 23 SCAN has tested 5194 samples from respondents with self-reported CLI symptoms and 3249 samples from
respondents without CLI symptoms reported.”
But only 67 people with symptoms tested positive for covid, out of 5194. And only 5 without symptoms.
Am I misreading this SCAN report?
Cicero:
That does seem to be what that particular data set says. The article says the modelers “incorporated” data from SCAN, not “relied” on it, so presumably there’s other data sets out there as well.
When I click through to it, it’s hard to drag hard numbers out of the IDM report, other than “95% of the population is still fully susceptible”, which implies an infection rate of 5% of the population. That’s 377K for the whole state, or roughly 26 times the number of positive tests/”cases”.
The MIT model estimates infected for the entire state of Washington at 104K, or 7 times the number of positive tests/”cases”.
Brian:
To accept estimates as valid one must know and trust the estimators. And, of course, their “models”.
I prefer real data, like SCAN.