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.]
