Apparently the statistics we have been hammered over the head with for months, that have been used to frighten American, close schools, and manipulate Presidential elections, are pure, unadulterated kaka, and, more amazing still, health professionals have known this all along.
KABOOM!
Here is a quote casually thrown into an October Newsweek article about Joe Biden’s attempts to argue the President Trump’s policies have killed people (the bolding is mine):
Biden’s claim doesn’t acknowledge that the U.S. counts coronavirus deaths differently from other countries. Indeed, we are counting deaths differently than we have for any other disease. “The case definition is very simplistic,” Dr. Ngozi Ezike, director of Illinois Department of Public Health, explains. “It means, at the time of death, it was a COVID positive diagnosis. That means, that if you were in hospice and had already been given a few weeks to live, and then you also were found to have COVID, that would be counted as a COVID death. It means, technically even if you died of [a] clear alternative cause, but you had COVID at the same time, it’s still listed as a COVID death.”
Believe it or not, it gets worse. I, and many others, have long suspected that the Wuhan virus death totals were inflated this way, for reasons ranging to incompetence and laziness to greed and a deliberate intention to deceive the public. But here was the next brain-bomb (again, the emphasis is mine):
Such expansive definitions are not the fault of rogue public health officials. The rules direct them to do this. “If someone dies with COVID-19, we are counting that as a COVID-19 death,” White House coronavirus response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx noted multiple times.
Beyond including people with the virus who clearly didn’t die from it, the numbers are inflated by counting people who weren’t even infected. New York has classified many cases as coronavirus deaths even when postmortem tests have been negative. The diagnosis can be based on symptoms, which are often similar to those of the seasonal flu..it seems clear that at least two-thirds of the reported fatalities are actually due to causes other than the coronavirus…
Clear to whom? I never hear or read this mentioned. If a blogger suggests this, it’s dismissed as a “conspiracy theory.” Right now, as I type this, Headline News is flogging the death theme: here is a Florida healthcare worker tearing up, telling us that “there is so much death,” that this “a war,” and how hard it is to tell parents that their child died “because of the pandemic.”
I don’t understand this at all. The method of assigning deaths is a material part, perhaps THE material part, of what the public and policymakers need to know in order to assess the nature of the pandemic. If the US counts Wuhan virus deaths differently from other nations, this means that putting charts comparing alleged US pandemic deaths to the rest of the world is irresponsible and dishonest is indefensible (except to cause panic and bash the Trump administration.) At the very least, any article or feature relating to “pandemic deaths” in the United States should as a matter of policy include a disclaimer explaining that that so-called Wuhan fatalities are determined as the Newsweek article revealed.
The New York Times is still running its misleading and fearmongering “those we have lost” feature every week. It never mentions any other possible causes of death while cherry-picking the deceased to maximize false narratives. If my father had died in his sleep at the age of 89 sometime in the last ten months (instead of 2009) and been diagnosed with the virus before or after his demise, the Times could have included him in its weekly sentimental fear-fest, if it figured it was time to include a WWII veteran in the mix. But as my dad’s doctor made clear, any one of many maladies, or none of them, could have been the cause of his death. Dad had a slight cold when he died: by the logic being used to inflate the pandemic casualty list, he could have been called a common cold victim.
Again, I don’t understand. I know nobody pays attention to Newsweek any more, and deservedly so, but its sources in this piece seem sound. How can the news media get away with ignoring a factor that literally changes the assessment of how serious the pandemic is? Why hasn’t the Trump administration emphasized this more? Why would it not only assent to an exaggerated death total used by his political foes (and the news media) to claim he has “blood on his hands,” but continue to enable it? Why hasn’t it taken action to stop an accounting method that is misleading and fueling unjustified fear, destructive societal changes, and bad policy?
Kaboom.
Ethics Alarms 
This statisical slight of hand was clear to me for months, what bothers me is that people are deliberately whipping up the fear to the detriment of everything. We have become a world of Chicken Littles feeling superior for making Scooby and the gang panic and flail. Too many sociopaths in key positions enjoy the power from fear…
In the U.K. the standard for recording a Covid death is if it occurred within 28 days of a positive test. So, I suppose it could be worse here in the U.S..
Heads exploding, although traumatic, is the appropriate response to a careful review of the situation.
Anger is the next healing step. Organized civil disobedience is next. (Not that hard when having Thanksgiving is against the rules. Or going to church. Or attending a funeral, birthday party, anniversary, or just hanging out with friends.)
My family has known about this since about Spring/Early Summer (sorry it all kind of ran together this year so all I can say is it was after Easter but before the riots). During that month, a friend of my mother’s was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer and told she had at most a month to live, even on experimental treatment, and that assumed that she could remain infection-free. Even a minor cold would kill her, we learned. Well, two weeks later, she passed after having just tested positive for COVID. She is a COVID death, one of those statistics, and when my mother, an RN (non-practicing at this time), said, “wait a minute, she didn’t die of COVID, she died of lung cancer” she was told that she needed to shut up. The woman died two weeks earlier than the estimate, so it was COVID, not her stage four cancer that killed her. The way that COVID is diagnosed in death is even sketchier, with doctors needing no reason for calling a death COVID other than suspicion. No testing is required, no list of symptoms, nothing. Facilities and doctors get money for COVID patients and COVID deaths. This inflates the numbers even further. Furthermore, one of my mother’s friends who works on a reservation as a nurse says that the reservation gets more money for every case they report, so they send each test as a separate case, and the rules are that if you test positive once, you must test weekly until you get two negative results. Assuming that the virus sticks around for two weeks after the first appearance of symptoms, it is not uncommon to get two to three positive tests per person, but if they are reported as separate people, that is 2-3x the amount of money the reporting authorities get. This is found at other hospitals as well, according my mother’s social circle of nurses. My mother tried to step up and say this was wrong, and she was scorned as a conspiracy theorist and troublemaker. The medical profession has, generally speaking, lost my confidence, as they continue to seek more money, but not deal with these things in an ethical way.
I am of the opinion this covid cause of death and case reporting thing is the most massive Medicare fraud undertaking in history. Insofar as the federal administrators seem to be encouraging it and playing a role in it, it’s simply a fraud on the taxpayers and will never be prosecuted even though the dollar amounts involved are astronomical. I’m going to assume hospitals will make more money in 2020 than ever before. By a large dollar amount.
This happened as well with my daughter-in-law, sister-in-law, and niece, who are nurses.
I hear more cases such as this from other medical professionals who remain in the field with ethics.
I lost a lot of respect for the medical field, and I no longer trust them.
They know what they are doing is wrong and illegal on many different levels.
It is a moneymaker, and I do not see either side of the political arena going to make the changes and hold people accountable to stop it.
I figure that researching the path of whom is making the monies from the virus from the concept of the virus to now and days ahead is the only way we will find more answers to address this corruption..
The answer to all the questions in the last paragraph of the post appears to be that the “deep state” or “swamp” (pick one — I hate both terms) is completely intractable. Federal employees run the country regardless of the elected representatives who simply come and go, talking of Michelangelo. An outsider getting elected as president can not clean out the stalls. Bureaucratic inertia.
And this cause of death thing has bothered me from day one. I too have heard anecdotes confirming that covid cause of death determinations are made all the time with no regard to the actual cause of death. It’s good for business.
But Jack, don’t worry. Forget it, it’s D.C! These are all the best and the brightest people who are working for the greater good! They only have our best interests at heart. And trust me, they’re smart, so they KNOW what’s in our best interest.
Answering the question of who this propaganda helps and what type of alliance would be necessary to so thoroughly propagate this lie is all anyone reasonable needs to know.
Too bad America is running out of reasonable people and growing in people who directly approve of the Media-Democrat lies to bring down faith in the Republic.
The statistical shell game hasn’t been a secret. Birx how the casualties were being assessed during at least two of the President’s new conferences with Trump standing right next to her. That, coupled with the incestuous arrangement that hospitals get extra money for Covid patients while they are the ones diagnosing the infections, caused me to disregard the death rate as pure propaganda meant to scare us into not fighting back on onerous restrictions on our personal liberty.
I thought Birx had more credibility than Fauci. Obviously, I was gravely mistaken.
jvb
Here is the specific order that changed Covid-19 reporting. No other disease or condition is reported this way in the U.S..
Click to access Alert-2-New-ICD-code-introduced-for-COVID-19-deaths.pdf
Wow. “where the disease caused or is assumed to have caused or contributed to death.” I guess that pretty much covers it!
No, it doesn’t. You have to consider the fact that for every death a hospital lists as ‘COVID’, they get an additional $30,000 from insurance or Medicare. All the hospitals are facing financial ruin because of the lack of patients (consider that for a moment) due to Wuhan NIH COVID. There wouldn’t be any incentive to maximize the COVID money…I mean deaths, would there?
But Michael, hospitals say they’re running at over 90 percent capacity? What’s the break even occupancy for hospitals? They’re losing optional surgeries, but so much of that is done at surgi-centers anyway. Plus they’re getting their covid bonuses. I still think hospitals must be doing great. If the threat at the door is no more empty hospital beds, business must be good.
The week ending 11/9 US hospital capacity was at 70.2%, 4.7% higher than the 2016-2018 3 year average. Obviously there is variation state-to-state, and city to city. My state, Washington shows a 1.6% increase; Montana had the largest increase, +35.3%, although still only at 70.7% capacity; New Mexico shows an -11.8% decrease, with capacity use at 66.3%.
Figures are from the American Hospital Association Data Hub and the HHS Protect System.
That last paragraph sums up many of my questions, but does little to answer them. When I read these things, I lose what little faith in the “government” I had left. If they are lying about this, what else are they lying about?
I get that counting of deaths as CoronaVirus has a financial gain for the health care provider. But, was this entire thing really intended to flip the 2020 election and kill Trump off? Is that the final answer? Anything but Trump? Why would that be? Was he really such a threat to the “system” that he had to be removed by any means necessary? If so, that would include destroying the economy and creating societal panic, both of which worked beyond belief.
jvb
Easy enough to check. All we have to do is watch and see if how the counts are counted changes during Biden’s presidency. He doesn’t have to make a single change, and cases will plummet! COVID will be defeated! We’ll all be saved!
It’ll also tell us if the root cause of a choice like this was money, or politics – if they keep the crooked counting, we’ll know it was just to grift as much as they could. If it changes, it was just to trash Trump. Time will tell!
As regards the election, I think it’s fair to say that the Covid-19 situation was the tool at hand for those opposed to Trump. An actual health issue was blown way out of any sensible proportion, vast societal damage was (and continues to be) done, and a complicit media blamed all aspects of the situation on Trump.
It is a virus, although a blessedly benign one, and behaves like all the other viruses humanity has been subject to. The Illusion of Control has resulted in governments crippling society, to no positive end.
I think I brought most of these points up months ago, to be met with derision.
(1) The definition of a COVID death is overly broad and encompasses many other causes of death. It really means ‘Death while COVID-positive or having symptoms that could be COVID even without a COVID-positive test.
(2) Hospitals and nursing homes have been given a financial incentive to list any death they possibly can list as COVID.
(3) The PCR test is running WAY too many cycles and is not reporting the cycle where the DNA was detected (as it is supposed to). This is built into the machines for the tests. It has to be intentional or EVERY SINGLE PERSON at the CDC and the testing labs around the country is incompent. This is resulting in 90% of the positives being false positives.
(4) The definition of a case has been changed several times, making comparing data from today to data from just 2-3 months ago impossible. In addition, each state has been allowed to have their own, incompatible definition of a case. We are defining people close to a person testing positive as cases now. The EU only counts a positive COVID nucleic acid test as a case.
The only statistic you can somewhat trust is the total death numbers. Last time I checked, we still had fewer deaths in 2020 than last time in 2019. We have a lethal pandemic with very few, if any, dead bodies. The number is within the standard deviation of deaths from year to year. The only states significantly ahead were NY, MA and a few other Northeastern states. In other words, the only states that had a significant number of fatalities are the same ones they want the other states to use as a model.
When I started seeing this stuff, I discussed it with some microbiologists I trust and they are going to use this as a case study of what not to do for years, assuming they are allowed to.
The biggest public health and financial policy screw up of all time. Who didn’t see this coming?
I’m late to the party, but it gets better. At least one of the counties here in Iowa asks a Wuhan-positive patient how many people are in their immediate household…and those people are automatically presumed positive and counted in the tally, regardless of whether those family members were actually tested or no.
We are being lied to at some level on pretty much every level about the Wuhan virus and that’s disgraceful.
As a non-US certifier of deaths, the description of how COVID deaths are being defined and counted (in the article and in the NVSS document in the comments here) makes sense to me. Dr Allen (author of the Newsweek article) states that “[…] we are counting deaths differently than we have for any other disease” but doesn’t elaborate. I don’t see what he means. In certifying deaths, we rely on tests and clinical gestalt, as we do in life. For example, the vast majority of people are diagnosed with colds and flus without a formal test, and in the right clinical setting, you don’t need a CT scan to diagnose someone with cancer. The stakes are higher with COVID diagnosis and death-counting, but I don’t, on the face of it, see how it is being done “differently than we have for any other disease”.
I agree that it’s a problem when these procedures are not known to the general public, who are daily exposed to and expected to interpret death statistics. I hesitate to attribute too much to this, though, when the general public interprets other death statistics that have been generated in the same way. In other words, the COVID death numbers can be compared to flu death numbers, even both are not counted as one might expect.
The conflict of interest with increased payments for COVID patients may be a concern for death counting, if treating physicians and death certifiers are the same person (which it often is in an inpatient setting). If not, then whether or not COVID is accurately coded is down to our trust in individual health professionals, and I’m sure we all have different opinions on that.
The specific examples of inferred and suspected incorrect counts described in the article do concern me, as they should concern anyone. I think it’s an unsubstantiated leap to say that this materially changes the situation and would like to point out that case trends would be expected to be relatively immune to these effects. Still, I’m absolutely all for an accurate and unbiased count.
When it comes to the overall picture of things, I still think COVID is a public health concern worth making economic concessions for. I agree strongly with Dr Allen’s semi-buried statement:
“Even if the true death toll is closer to 60,000 than 200,000, this pandemic is a big deal. But we need some perspective. During the 2017-18 flu season, 61,000 Americans died from the flu.”
I would add that having 2 flu season-equivalents in one year is still a bad thing, and it would be hard to argue that fewer would be dead without existing public health measures.
Still (and obviously), I don’t think these decisions should be made by ill-informed or outright deceived policy-makers.
In what non-US country where you certify deaths would a patient with long term Stage 5 diabetes, expiring with renal failure and a common cold, have the death coded as caused by the cold?
If it hastened death, it goes on the death certificate. I can’t say I’ve put a cold on a death certificate before, but it could easily happen in an AIDS patient, for example. As for something more substantial, like, say, COVID, or flu A/B, or any bacterial pneumonia…all the time. In case it isn’t clear, there are many spaces for the most responsible causes of death and concurrent illnesses on a death certificate.
The NCHS document I included above directs that if Covid-19 is present or suspected, it is to be listed as the cause of death, that is, first listed on death certificate or primary cause. Other morbidities are listed as secondary or tertiary causes, no matter how severe. Is that the policy that you execute as a non-US certifier of deaths?
This is reminiscent of counting suicides in gun crime.
Good point! I hadn’t thought of that.
My favorite gun statistic manipulation though is defining children as everyone under 25, so as to include all gang bangers that aren’t in prison or already dead.
Is it me getting old or is the bullshit less tolerable than before?
“Get off my yard!”
But yes, as with Trayvon Martin and the hands up don’t shoot guy and even George Floyd, black guys never grow up. They remain “children” in perpetuity because some mother is always wailing, “My BABY! He was just a child!” Brilliant.
But with the cause of death on death certificates subject to such vagaries, how can policy makers be anything but ill-informed. A double flu season is a big deal to you, but we should shut down entire sectors of the economy and schools pursuing methodologies that have no proven record of success? “Hey boys and girls, let’s try a lockdown! Will it work? Who the fuck knows?”
Worse, we’re sacrificing virgins to the volcano, which is erupting. When it stops we will be told that “It would have been much worse if we hadn’t sacrificed those virgins”. Worse still, anyone who points out that virgin sacrifice is costly, and has no proof of success, indeed is a societal negative, will be vilified, censored, cancelled and ostracized.
Wait until they find out the leading cause of death in all life forms is births. The public health experts will demand we terminate all pregnancies to prevent these deaths.
The biggest revelation (among a series of significant discoveries) arising out of the Wuhan pandemic is the incompetence and venality of the public health establishment. From the deliberate miscounting of cases, to the proclamation that only large scale SJW demonstrations are not spreading events, to the misleading guidance on masks, to the total failure to account for deaths resulting from their recommended prophylactic measures, our public health policy professionals have failed us over and over again. Their politicization of the pandemic damages public confidence in science and virtually every institution using their guidance.
That was when they not just jumped the shark, they jumped multiple shivers of sharks.
There is no more reason to ever heed these COVID-19 restrictions!
The state health department in my state is reporting every positive test, even those that turn out to be false positives, as a new COVID case. A nurse who works there told me this today.
“…the U.S. counts coronavirus deaths differently from other countries. Indeed, we are counting deaths differently than we have for any other disease. “The case definition is very simplistic,” Dr. Ngozi Ezike, director of Illinois Department of Public Health, explains. “It means, at the time of death, it was a COVID positive diagnosis. ”
Australia does it differently (of course it does).
The last death – which with a lot of luck, really will be the *last* death we have – was of a 70 yr old who contracted the virus in July, but had been free of it since September.
Too much damage to the lungs from the virus, and despite being on hyper oxygen, they slowly failed over the next 2 months.
This, and all the other deaths from lethal damage caused by Covid19 would not be in the US stats apparently, unless the virus was still active.
I am a critical care physician. I am at the frontlines of this pandemic, in a state of “war” against an unseen enemy that has brought unimaginable destruction in its path.
I print out the list of twenty-three patients I am to care for today. All of them are housed in the COVID ICU. I don my N95, taking care to mold the edges around my nose and cheekbones, testing for a good seal. I put on my face shield and start rounds.
Ms. A is a middle-aged woman on high flow oxygen. She has to take short pauses between words to catch her breath. Her oxygen level falls to 84 percent, and I coach her to take deep breaths. It takes her five minutes to recover. She has been in the ICU for 5 days, and I see no improvement. I predict that she will need intubation.
Next, I enter Mr. B’s room. He’s sixty-two years old. He has been in the ICU for over 40 days. He was intubated early in his hospital stay. His lungs have permanent scarring, and he will never breathe on his own. His daughters had made posters for his hospital room. The man in these posters is smiling and having the time of his life. On the other hand, Mr. B is at the end of his life, waiting for his family to remove the ventilator, which serves only to prolong his suffering.
Mr. C is a fifty-year-old Hispanic male. He has been in the ICU for three weeks on high flow oxygen, finally needing intubation. We had chatted about his vacation to Mexico before the illness. His family had all recovered, and he was eager to go back home. He was eventually weaned off life support and discharged home. I was glad he got his wish.
My next patient is Mr. D, a black, diabetic, hypertensive man who is fifty-five. He has been in the ICU for two weeks. He has been reluctant about ventilatory support. Today he is lethargic. I obtain permission from him to talk to his wife. She consents to intubating her husband, since she is his surrogate decision-maker. My new intubation routine involves covering patients with a clear plastic drape to limit droplets’ aerosolization during this highly aerosol-generating procedure. Mr. D develops kidney failure and needs dialysis. His lungs show no signs of recovery, and like Mr. C, we are waiting for his wife to make the unspeakable decision to take him off life support.
Ms. E is a petite Asian woman who is in her sixties. She contracted COVID-19 through her college-going sons’ girlfriend. She is on high flow oxygen in a state of “happy hypoxia.” She is ill but not in distress. I think she will recover.
Mr. F is in his seventies. He has been in the hospital for three weeks and improving. He had gone into cardiac arrest overnight and was actively dying. His wife had been informed. We allow family visitation (in full PPE) when patients are at the end-of-life. Mr. F can hold on until his wife arrived.
I move on to Mr. G, who is in his forties. He is a diabetic, Hispanic farmworker. He had been in the ICU for three weeks on high flow oxygen. There had been no change in his condition. He is motivated and self-prone to improve his lung aeration.
Mr. H lifts my spirits after this exhausting morning. He is 30 years old. He had come through the ER yesterday. He had been defibrillated seven times. His EKG showed a myocardial infarction (STEMI). The cardiologist had elected to treat him with thrombolytics. It was a good call. He was tired but awake, off the ventilator, eager to go home. He had been diagnosed with COVID-19 a week ago and had woken up yesterday morning with chest pains. He had developed blood clots in his coronary artery due to COVID-19 causing the cardiac arrest.
Mr. I is seventy-one years old. He has been in the ICU for over two months. He has a tracheostomy. He is very weak and delirious. We are awaiting placement at a long-term care facility to continue to rehab and possibly wean off the ventilator.
Next, I arrive in Mr. Ks room; his heart rate is 150 beats per minute, and his blood pressure is 80/30. He is crashing. He had tested positive for COVID-19, diabetic ketoacidosis, and had a STEMI. The cardiologist found significant coronary blockages. As a consequence, he was in heart failure and taking a turn for the worse. He lost pulses, and we started CPR. This went on for 20 minutes. I called his mother over the phone. She asked me what to do – should she come in? I informed her that if she visited and contracted COVID, her chances of survival were not favorable. She decided not to visit. She made him a DNR. She asked me to call her if he passed. I made that call 20 minutes later.
It’s 11 a.m. I walk to the cubby in the corner of the unit that serves as a physician charting area. I need a few minutes to regroup and inadvertently shed a tear. I don’t want this moment of weakness, emotion, and possibly my own humanity to be witnessed. In four hours, I have lost two patients.
From https://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2020/11/i-am-a-critical-care-physician-these-are-the-patients-in-the-icu.html
And what news of little Nell?
Seconded.
What was zoebrain’s point anyway?
Our models predicted 2000 US deaths daily by the end of the week. Looks like we underestimated your stupid selfishness, even though the current numbers are inflated by late reports from the holiday period..
You catch more flies with honey than vinegar. Calling malicious idiots stupid and selfish may be true, but is hardly helpful.
It’s a bit late now though. If pigs start flying, and Biden’s call to mask up and keep distance for 100 days is near universally followed, you’ll still get half a million additional deaths, and a ruined economy because of the dead, and more importantly, the maimed, who will be an economic burden for decades.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/12/1/1999273/-The-coming-tsunami
We do not underestimate your disdain for freedom.
I shared this blog post on several Usenet newsgroups.
http://groups.google.com/g/Sci.Med.Cardiology/c/eCv1IXy7w9I/m/ZuomlWnNBAAJ
Here is a reply from Andrew B. Chung.
I will let Jack and the others reply to Andrew B. Chung’s reply.
If the latter were true, it would have been very easy for Mr. Jack
Marshall to name multiple well-known “health professionals” saying
that the COVID-19 death statistics are wrong.
Welcome to “appeal to authority.” The statistics are either right or wrong: how many “well-known” professionals believe one way or the other is irrelevant. The fact that deaths not caused by the virus are attributed to the virus does prove the statistics are wrong.
Instead, multiple well-known health professionals such as Drs. Birx,
Fauci, Redfield, etc., are publicly saying that if anything, the
statistics are an underestimate of how many Americans have died from
COVID-19 as evident by the number of excess American deaths that have
occurred this year being more than the American COVID-19 death
statistic.
That is still open to question.
I hope Mr. Jack Marshall has survived his own self-detonation.
Whatever that’s supposed to mean, other than that the writer is a jerk.
ImPOTUS45’s policy of not mandating by executive order that everyone
wear facemasks at indoor public gatherings of more than 5 people has
caused more Americans to die needlessly.
Utter nonsense, and it would also be unconstitutional as well as arbitrary and unsupportable.
Such is the lesson unlearned from the 1918 FLU pandemic as evident by
excess American deaths in 2020 being comparable to excess American
deaths in 1918.
Wrong wrong wrong. Cross-comparisons about different illnesses in different times are useless. Andrew exposes himself as a Wuhan ignoramous
Simply look to Korea and Taiwan which both had national facemask
mandates and both have experienced markedly fewer COVID-19 deaths to
get an estimate that ImPOTUS45 (and his enablers including especially
those in the Senate who voted not to remove him after his impeachment)
should be blamed for the more than 260,000 Americans that have so far
died prematurely of COVID-19 in 2020.
And cross cultural comparisons as well. And as the post pointed out, no other country counts cases like we do.
As it should, because the COVID-19 coronavirus rapidly attacks all the
vital organs of the body so that it does kill much faster than all
other diseases can.
Ridiculous. The disease has a less than .01 death rate except for the highest risk group.
The only thing that can kill faster than COVID-19 is physical trauma,
as in the example of George Floyd, who was reportedly COVID-19
positive when he died while suffering physical trauma on his neck as
he was being kneed by police.This is why, though positive for COVID-19, George Floyd’s cause of
death was determined to be homicide based on the video evidence of
physical trauma at the time of death.
Also ridiculous. The writer proves he is too confused to pay attention to, except to point and laugh. Physical trauma is an intervening cause, and has nothing to do with the topic at hand. Morever, it is likely that Floyd was killed by a his own drug overdose, not physical trauma. And the virus has nothing to do with his story.
Aside to ME: I wouldn’t waste time on any group that had members capable of such a batty argument. On Ethics Alarms, he’d be banned under the stupidity rule.
I did share your reply on the group, so that its members can read it for themselves.
Here is Andrew B. Chung’s web site, for those who are curious.
http://migration.heartmdphd.com/
Wow.
Just one point — the 1918 pandemic killed on the order of 675k Americans out of about 103 million. If you extrapolate for increased population, that would mean well over 2 million deaths in the U.S. and worldwide close to 250 million.
So no, excess deaths in 2020 are nowhere near 1918 by at least an order of magnitude.
Reading through the guy’s post, as you linked to it Michael, was painful. I clicked through a few of the links he provided between scriptural chapter/verse and Covid-19 misinformation. This person has a troubled and confused mind, with delusions of grandeur.
This is from one of his links:
“The healing of millions that is happening now by
http://WDJW.net/HeartDoc Andrew, who is
http://bit.ly/wonderfully_hungry in the Holy Spirit, Who causes
(Deuteronomy 8:3) us to hunger, is also in fulfillment of the LORD’s
John 14:12 prophecy:”
I doubt he is a practicing physician, as he seems to imply that the Lord has medically authorized him.
Hey, I figured out he was a wacko without even checking!
He left a reply on the newsgroups.
I will quote this one sentence from him, which was in reply to me telling him to feel free to comment here.
Full link here.
http://groups.google.com/g/Sci.Med.Cardiology/c/eCv1IXy7w9I/m/ZuomlWnNBAAJ
Translation: “I’m free to be an idiot!”
It is indeed tragic, as Andrew B. Chung had the opportunity to learn by engaging in the comments here.