Seemingly stunning COVID news from Italy
We’ve known for a long time that the COVID death figures are iffy because anyone who has COVID and dies is counted as a COVID-caused death. And yet that’s the way the numbers continue to be reported, which certainly gives the appearance of a purposeful inflation of COVID numbers. And I also would guess that most people are unaware of this.
We’re not the only nation that’s been doing it this way; another is Italy. But Italy has decided to correct its figures to eliminate those who died with rather than of COVID.
The extremity of the results appears shocking at first glance:
The Italian Higher Institute of Health has drastically reduced the country’s official COVID death toll number by over 97 per cent after changing the definition of a fatality to someone who died from COVID rather than with COVID.
Italian newspaper Il Tempo reports that the Institute has revised downward the number of people who have died from COVID rather than with COVID from 130,000 to under 4,000.
“Yes, you read that right. Turns out 97.1% of deaths hitherto attributed to Covid were not due directly to Covid,” writes Toby Young.
Of the of the 130,468 deaths registered as official COVID deaths since the start of the pandemic, only 3,783 are directly attributable to the virus alone.
But when you read the details, a different picture emerges:
“All the other Italians who lost their lives had from between one and five pre-existing diseases. Of those aged over 67 who died, 7% had more than three co-morbidities, and 18% at least two,” writes Young.
“According to the Institute, 65.8% of Italians who died after being infected with Covid were ill with arterial hypertension (high blood pressure), 23.5% had dementia, 29.3% had diabetes, and 24.8% atrial fibrillation. Add to that, 17.4% had lung problems, 16.3% had had cancer in the last five years and 15.7% suffered from previous heart failures.”
Here’s the problem with that: many of those things don’t ordinarily kill people for a long long time, although they might on average shorten their lifespan somewhat. Having a predisposing factor that makes a person more vulnerable does not mean that the disease isn’t the main actor in that person’s death.
To understand the figures, in a Western country such as the US or Italy, the percentage of the over-67 population with something like high blood pressure is odinarily enormous: for example, in the US, a whopping 70% of adults over 65 have hypertension, and I would guess the percentage of adults over 67 (as in that quote above) would be slightly higher.
So, if Italy’s hypertension figures are similar to ours, there is actually a slightly lower percentage of hypertensive individuals over 67 in the “death from COVID” category than would be expected by chance.
For diabetes in the US, the rate for the over-65 population is 26.8%, which is only a tiny bit lower than the figure in Italy of those who died with COVID and had diabetes. You get the drift, I think. However, I would guess that people with previous heart failure and recent cancer are probably more likely to have actually died from those diseases rather than from COVID, compared to people with pre-existing hypertension or diabetes who probably did die from COVID.
Therefore I would say I’m pretty sure that, although the 130,468 figure for Italy is almost certainly way too high, the 3,783 figure is almost certainly way too low.
Which leaves us pretty much where we started: not knowing how many people really died from COVID.
[NOTE: I didn’t find something recent on hypertension rates among the over-65 population in Italy, but this slightly older article indicates rates similar to those in the US, although it also depends on whether the definition of “hypertension” is the same in the two countries.]
The place to start is to look at excess deaths (I assume the Italians have done this). Were Italy’s excess deaths in the last 21 months roughly equal to 130K? Then you watch excess deaths over the next 21 months- if deaths were pulled forward, the signal should turn up.
COVID is like the last straw on the back of the crippled camel for a lot of people.
Any ability to accurately decipher the data ended when gov’ts started calling anybody with a positive COVID test who subsequently died an official ‘COVID death’.
Then to further warp everything here in the US (not sure other countries policies) the gov’t began (and still does I believe) paying hospitals extra for COVID patients and what you subsidize you get more of.
Yancey Ward:
But excess deaths can also be from people too afraid to go to the hospital for other diseases and treatment and dying when they otherwise would have lived, or from suicides from depression due to lockdown, for example.
Sure, but that is where you start. Has Italy had 130K excess deaths in the last 21 months? If not, then they are probably right to adjust the numbers. If they have, then the change may not be justified.
Are the people in Italy with high BP being treated with drugs, as so many in the US are? I have it and take my pill every day. If I died from Covid would I be a statistic that says I have high BP even though it is controled?
The govt stats are hopelessly muddied.
It gives govt great power because independent forces can’t challenge them
“Which leaves us pretty much where we started: not knowing how many people really died from COVID.”
Which is entirely intentional being a necessary component to sell the fear.
I love it when Neo issues medical opinions, just like she, the trained lawyer, loves my legal opinions!
Griffin is 100% correct.
The Italian data are rather sobering: 95% of the dead had atrial fibrillation (AF), dementia, diabetes and/or lung problems. AF is not ordinarily associated with an otherwise healthy heart. Untreated, it generates blood clots which can become pulmonary or arterial emboli.
Even if you have heart failure with or without AF and need hospital care, you will not be admitted before a COVID test. And voila! The admitting diagnosis becomes “COVID” if positive, because Medicare’s one time hospital payment per admission via its Prospective Payment System is higher than for many other diagnoses, a change instituted just because of COVID, and the COVID test is sufficient proof of diagnosis. Most have “co-morbidities” as the Italians detailed, which brought most of them to the hospital in the first place, in all likelihood. Medicare does not increase that payment even if the patient spends 2 weeks in ICU.
The survival cost of those who delayed hospitalization out of COVID exposure fear with conditions like colon cancer will be apparent over a few years from now. So COVID also causes the deaths of people who have never been infected! A several week delay in resecting co-rectal cancer is associated with a rise in the Staging, and that indicates a lesser prognosis. We are seeing that already.
Cicero,
I think I heard somewhere that they were trying to end the extra payment for COVID patients but hospitals (naturally) were balking but I’m sure there is all kinds of cash in the spendapaloozas being passed in congress for this to continue forever.
I posted this on FB yesterday and got the typical “fact checker” BS that froze my account. However, afterwards I searched and saw someone who translated the original article from Italian to English, and it is supposedly someone giving the 3783 figure as a guesstimate and that Italy has actually not changed their data. I don’t know Italian, so don’t know. Not sure who to believe…. However, I do believe, medically IMHO, that there were here in the US (and likely in Italy too) many deaths attributed to Covid that were simply Covid + and not really died of Covid deaths. Similarly, we know that the reason there was no flu winter 2020-21 is that the test mainly used was confounding flu and Covid. This has been discussed previously, and this test (which was THE test before) is no longer used. So, lots of false data all around…On a different note, China now is having a resurgence in 31 provinces of Covid with new lockdowns. Again, makes me think about this gene and what others could be in play? https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abj3624#F2
But excess deaths can also be from people too afraid to go to the hospital for other diseases and treatment and dying when they otherwise would have lived, or from suicides from depression due to lockdown, for example.
Relative to Covid, that’s small potatoes, and most of those things will take a long time to flow through — cancers will take years, for example. To a certain extent the quick deaths are cancelled by all those who don’t die on the roads, etc.
When I have been able to find recent figures suicides are not rising in lockdown in the West. It seems people don’t get as depressed about how bad they have it when everyone else is struggling too. (A lot of hypochondriacs actually like a real thing to worry about too.)
I chased it down for the US, and clearly the official Covid numbers are close to correct. There were times when the death rate was close to 150% of normal. It’s basically got to be Covid causing that — you have to be pretty outlandish to provide alternative explanations for that increase in deaths. Tinfoil hat level outlandish.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm#dashboard
There’s a lot to dislike about the way governments have spread fear, but the disease is clearly often fatal to those in the at risk groups.
Chester Draws:
Death rates from heart disease and diabetes shot up during COVID times. Decline in cancer screening and increase in cancer deaths during COVID times.
“…the disease is clearly often fatal to those in the at risk groups….”
Very true.
Especially when government policy is to conceal, ridicule and repudiate proven ways to treat the damn disease—in essence denying that they even exist.
(And even more especially when policies are instituted to ensure that “at risk groups” CATCH the disease…BTW, should we mention, while we’re at it, manipulating PCR testing to create—when it’s politically “desirable”—the illusion that there are more (or fewer) cases of COVID than there actually are?0
And no, the above is not “Tinfoil hat level outlandish”.
(In fact such policies continue as we speak….)
Not sure I agree with you on this Neo.
When people die of “natural causes” resulting from old age, they normally have multiple systemic failures going on at the same time. But, they don’t normally die from any one of those. They succumb to the next illness that comes along, such as the flu or pneumonia. Their bodies simply can no longer fight off disease. In this case, Covid has replaced the flue as immediate cause, but the underlying proximate causes remain the same.
The only way we can rationally analyze the effects of COVID-19 are by looking at Excess Deaths. Although, even these are contaminated by the changes in public health policies and things such as the increase in suicides.
I think Itally is doing the right thing here.
Early on in the pandemic, I read, somewhere, someone proposing a new statistic to measure the effects of covid on public health. They argued that deaths per se was not as important as the total loss of living years, but for the virus.
It seems to take some years for the total deaths in country to come out, if that number can be trusted like all these days since there is a agenda.
But I have for a year thought 2019 will be a just noticeable change from 2018. Covid certainly helped kill those who were going to die within a year so the others not expected otherwise are going to be the ones showing up.
As a guess 10 – 15 thousand
“…total loss of living years…” Something I have thought is that Covid accelerated deaths by “only” a matter of months for many of the older crowd already in nursing homes. The secondary effects of Covid and Covid policy doing the same. My dad was suffering from Congestive heart failure in the spring of 2020 and would not go to the hospital on the night of his death. At his previous stay at the hospital , Covid restrictions had already kicked in and mother could not stay with him or visit. Would he have lived a few more months or a few more years had he gone to the hospital that night? I do not know for sure, but I suspect , maybe a few more weeks or months? The Justice of the Peace that came to the house, after the EMTs and Sheriff Deputy, to officially declare his death, told me he was seeing more deaths at home. How many were home Covid deaths and how many were other deaths I do not know.
“Yes, you read that right. Turns out 97.1% of deaths hitherto attributed to Covid were not due directly to Covid,” writes Toby Young.”
Toby Young of Daily Skeptic goes on to write in his article from November 3, 2021: “Stop Press: We’re doing some digging into this to try to corroborate it. Treat with caution until further notice.
Stop Press 2: We trawled through the various websites of the Italian National Institute of Health (NIH) and National Institute of Statistics to try to corroborate this piece from an Italian newspaper, and it appears to be based on this report (in English) published on or before October 20th. The author of the piece is effectively stating his opinion that only those who died of Covid without comorbidities (2.9%) should be counted as a Covid death, and then extrapolates from there to suggest that the ‘real’ Covid death toll over the period in question was only 3,783. This is all contrary to the report itself and to the NIH’s detailed guidance (in Italian) on how to classify Covid deaths. It thus seems as though the article severely misrepresents the position of the NIH, but a lot seems to have been lost in translation and this is really just an opinion piece where the author is poking fun at the NIH while trying to make a point about the risks of Covid.
By Toby Young / 3 November 2021 • 12.01”
https://dailysceptic.org/2021/11/03/italian-higher-institute-of-health-adjusts-number-of-deaths-due-to-covid-alone-since-february-2020-downwards-from-over-130000-to-under-4000/
“[T]his report (in English)” to which Mr. Young alludes is here: https://www.epicentro.iss.it/en/coronavirus/bollettino/Report-COVID-2019_5_october_2021.pdf (you may get a Danger, Will Robinson! message, but click on the button at page bottom to get through.)
My question is, how long will the American public, and particularly its major institutions such as airlines and hospitals, continue to tolerate what (to me) seems a clear constitutional violation, and a highly oppressive policy toward COVID.
The Italian COVID death data originated in a newspaper, and were perverted in their interpretation. Here is the info:
“Italy, which has suffered one of Europe’s worst Covid-19 death tolls relative to population in 2020, has reported more than 132,000 deaths related to the disease. The claims appear to have originated from an October 21 article published in Italian newspaper Il Tempo, which stated that the Istituto Superiore di Sanità (ISS) — Italy’s leading health institute — changed its Covid-19 data. The article alleged that a report published by the ISS on October 5 found only 2.9 percent of coronavirus deaths after the end of February 2020 can be counted as deaths caused by the coronavirus. The newspaper also claimed that the ISS had effectively admitted that “of the 130,468 deaths registered by official statistics at the time of the preparation of the new report, only 3,783 would be due to the power of the virus itself,” suggesting that the remaining deaths were not caused by the coronavirus because the patients had other underlying diseases or conditions. The claims circulating online incorrectly suggest that only patients without any comorbidities — a disease or condition that exists along with another disease or condition — can be counted as deaths caused by the coronavirus. The 2.9 percent figure represents patients with Covid-19 listed as the only cause of death, but the remaining deaths simply listed additional conditions, pre-existing illnesses, or complications, along with Covid-19. Pier David Malloni, a spokesperson at the ISS, described the claim as “fake news.” “This is completely wrong. What we wrote in the report is that the 2.9 percent of the people deceased did not have some other comorbidity,” he told AFP on November 4, 2021. Malloni explained that having one or more comorbidities “is a risk factor for Covid-19,” one that increases your chances of severe illness or death if you contract Covid-19.”
https://www.boomlive.in/world/italy-covid-19-death-toll-less-than-4000-fact-check-fake-news-15449
“…..Here’s the problem with that: many of those things don’t ordinarily kill people for a long long time, although they might on average shorten their lifespan somewhat. Having a predisposing factor that makes a person more vulnerable does not mean that the disease isn’t the main actor in that person’s death…..”
True, very true.
But.
Suppose these individuals who had other ailments had contracted, say, a bad case of the “normal” flu (not Covid) and died.
Would their death be attributed to the flu or their pre-existing conditions?
In either case, what finally pushed them off the cliff was the flu/Covid.
What is different this time is that Covid has become a political punching bag, whereas other common (e.g.., the flu) seasonal ailments are not. Because of this it is difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff in regards to assigning covid vs non-covid deaths.
It is interesting to speculate how this entire Covid mess would have been handled if Trump had never been president. Recall that Fauci, et. al., opposed Trump’s policies of banning travel from China.
Quite possibly, the pandemic would have then been treated as those of 1958 and 1968 were handled; i.e., life went on, no govt. interference, allowed the
flu / influenza to run its course.
They didn’t even cancel the Woodstock rock festival in 1968.
John Tyler:
People who just have hypertension or even diabetes don’t ordinarily die of the flu. If they are mega-old perhaps, but that’s because they are mega-old. But when they do I assume the cause of death is considered to be flu or pneumonia.
I had two relatives die of flu or pneumonia who actually were quite ill with cancer. I never looked at their death certificates, but my sense of it is that they were probably said to have died of cancer.
In addition, it seems that the death toll from COVID of those with hypertension who are over 65 pretty closely tracks to the percentage of people over 65 who have hypertension in the first place. In other words, it is probably more their age than the hypertension in that age group that is causing the susceptibility to serious COVID.
On the other hand, if young people who die of COVID have a much higher percentage of hypertension than other young people in their age group, then at least in that age group hypertension could be considered a significant predisposing factor for serious COVID. And yet you have to be careful about saying that, too, because hypertension in young people might – for example – be highly correlated with obesity, and perhaps obesity is really the risk factor. It’s not all that easy to tease out one factor in a group of related factors, and sometimes researchers don’t even try to do it, which causes very confusing results.
And I agree with you entirely about COVID and politics. Every statistic about COVID is political and is manipulated by people for those reasons. I can think of no other illness, and certainly not flu (even pandemic flu) that has ever been tracked and manipulated this way and to this extent.
And so, Andrea Widburg asks the obvious question:
“When Will The CDC Correct Its COVID Death-Counts, As Italy Just Did?”
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/when-will-cdc-correct-its-covid-death-counts-italy-just-did
Key graf:
“Summit News caught a fascinating story out of Italy: the Italian Higher Institute of Health decided it had miscounted COVID deaths. Instead of looking at people who died with COVID, as it once did, it looked only at people who died from COVID — leading to a 97% decrease in Italy’s COVID death count. So far, the CDC shows no signs of following suit….” [My highlights]
Don’t forget that a flow blown COVID infection is a vascular disease. It’s very difficult to tease out who died from what in an age group already suffering from various maladies.
I was shocked when I heard Dr. Zelenko say that over last winter he cultured, not tested, every patient that he had with possible CoV-19 signs and symptoms and even though both CoV-19 and the Common Flu are both coronaviruses, he never could culture the common Flu. He said last winter, in his area, the Flu completely disappeared. This raises many questions. I have to give Dr. Zelenko a lot of credit for a being a professional and a true physician. His question was “So, where did the Flu go”? Did someone forget to do something last winter that would benefit the profits of big pharma or did big pharma have something better rolling out?
Aaron:
I don’t know what you’re talking about. Flu is NOT a coronavirus.
Some common colds are caused by coronaviruses, but that’s not flu. Plus, the majority of common colds are not caused by coronaviruses (I wrote a post about that a while back but don’t have time to find it right now).
Flu was very low in 2020 but it did not disappear. Here are the CDC stats. Of course, you might think it’s all garbage because it’s the CDC, and I agree that they’ve earned a great deal of distrust.
Read recently that those dying of Covid averaged 2.6 other morbidity issues. That may have referred to an advanced age cohort. If even close to accurate, that means the expected remaining lifespan for a person with only one issue is irrelevant.
I note Colin Powell died of “complications” of C19. Heck,my father died of Parkinson’s before the kung flu was invented. And the virus causes myeloma? Who do they think they’re fooling? I know people who eat this up with a spoon.
Some part of the deaths attributed to Covid are fraudulent simply to collect more for treatment. A doctor serving in the Minn legislature put out a video in 2020 discussing the pressure doctors were under to put Covid as cause of death.
My wife works at an insurance agency that has a lot of doctors as clients. One doctor had fought cancer for 8 years before dying. Her husband was in the office taking care of paperwork and he was pissed. He pulled out her death certificate to show that Covid was listed as cause of death. Total BS, he said. She never had it. She wasted away and died of cancer. He was extremely angry that his wife’s death would be used as part of the political scam that Covid has become. People can’t even die with some dignity.
We have lots of similar reports. For example, the chief health officer in Orange County Fla (Orlando) admitted to reporters that the 30 something listed as having died from Covid (very unusual to have one so young) had actually died from a motorcycle wreck and merely had tested positive weeks before.
The fraud is real and extensive.
We shouldn’t be surprised. The lies have piled as high as a mountain from these folks. Not just Covid. Everything. Tote up all the serious and significant lies from the Clinton admin. The numbers for Obama were exponentially higher. As the Left really came to understand just how much dishonesty the news media and Big Tech would support, they have continued to double down.
Remember when the conventional wisdom was that Clinton’s lies about Monica would hurt him? How quaint to look back today. Supposed experts really thought that the lessons learned when Republicans had scandals would apply to Bubba and Hillary. No, really. Democrat privilege existed then, but not nearly as now.
They lie. About everything. All the time. Covid is just another in a long, long list of topics they lie about.
The tests were BS. The numbers on cases are BS. As are the numbers on hospitalizations and deaths. Lies on top of lies.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/11/vax-you-part-two.php
“watch for leftists like Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to tell us that the number of vaccinated “covid deaths” should be disregarded because the vast majority of those people didn’t actually die on account of covid. They died of cancer, fatal accident, etc., and coincidentally tested positive for covid. The same with hospitalizations.
Now they tell us! It has been true all along that the number of “covid deaths” has been grossly exaggerated, both because of liberal interpretations of covid death and on account of the cash bonus the federal government pays under Medicare if the covid box is checked, regardless of the actual cause of death. But this overcount of covid deaths is presumably the same for vaccinated and non-vaccinated persons, and therefore does not alter the fact that vaccination is proving not to be a reliable safeguard.”