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Covid “Fudge Factor” – A map of Covid data corruption and approach that worked

maximumtruth.substack.com

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Re: Covid “Fudge Factor” – A map of Covid data corruption and approach that worked

#21

Post by Zigurd »

If you are wondering how such underreporting could happen, just look at the comments on this thread, many of which are elaborations on the theme of "I'm not at all convinced excess deaths is a good measure of Covid-19 deaths."

Excess deaths and correcting for reporting reliability is how influenza deaths have been counted since about forever. The conclusion to draw is not that "COVID wasn't so bad" but rather that infectious disease prevention should always be taken more seriously. Policies like WFH, mask use, and limiting exposure to situations where super-spreading can take place should become part of the toolkit for fighting influenza and other infectious diseases.

Re: Covid “Fudge Factor” – A map of Covid data corruption and approach that worked

#22

Post by ajross »

Mattasher wrote: post #5

Interesting analysis, though he mentions early on a huge issue with the analysis: > It does come with one major caveat: Because it counts ALL deaths, it cannot on its own disentangle deaths caused by Covid itself, impacts from the lockdowns themselves, impacts from vaccines, or unrelated death trends. Especially as time goes on, and we see the effects of missed cancer screenings, economic destruction, increased obesi…

Seems like cancer and obesity are already quite well measured and robustly reported, though. Are there numbers to back up your hypothesis that people are dying more due to cancer and heart disease over the past two years?

Or, if you're just proposing that that "will" happen in the future, it seems like it's not really a refutation of the data in the linked article.

Re: Covid “Fudge Factor” – A map of Covid data corruption and approach that worked

#23

Post by cft »

> I spent 1.5 years in ex-Iron-Curtain countries during the Covid era, and people there acted less concerned about crowded indoor spaces and sneezing — and more concerned about surfaces. And everyone seemed to fear that getting physically cold would lead to colds

I went for the first time to Ukraine in the fall and got a fairly heavy case of COVID. My girlfriend is 29 and she was vaccinated with two Moderna shots 2 months prior and also got a heavy case of covid. We took a two-hour bus into another city. The bus was hermetically sealed because the driver bent the aluminum windows railings such that windows don't open to prevent drafts, so that people don't get colds. This was November and nobody was wearing a mask in the bus. By the end of the journey the windows were covered with condensate from 40 people breathing. When we got out of the bus we felt dizzy from lack of oxygen. I think both of us got extremely high doses of the virus and the vaccines were never really tested with those doses: this is why despite the age and recent Moderna vaccinations we both got fairly serious cases.

Re: Covid “Fudge Factor” – A map of Covid data corruption and approach that worked

#24

Post by ajross »

nerdponx wrote: post #15
pluijzer wrote: post #10

What I know from the Netherlands, at least from the numbers of hospitalisations, is that for the longest time we counted the number of people that had covid while being treated in hospital. This in contrast with most countries that counted the number of people in hospital, because of covid.

I remember reading that they were doing this in the US as well during the very early days of the pandemic. If you happened to have Covid in the hospital when you died, you "died from Covid". This of course was perfect material for the Covid hoax conspiracy theorists...

That's the way these things always work. There's no way to disentangle true causes of deaths. Influenza death statistics are people who come to health care sick and then die, even when the real cause is "pneumonia" or "heart attack" caused by the infection. You don't know they didn't have another simultaneous infection. You don't know they didn't have a pre-existing cardiac problem. It's just not a resolvable problem.

But no one screams about the flu hoax, do they? Your point is being used as an excuse. It's a nitpick to allow people to ignore an obvious conclusion (a whole lot of people died from covid), presumably because they don't want to have been wrong about masks or something.

Re: Covid “Fudge Factor” – A map of Covid data corruption and approach that worked

#25

Post by jdpel »

nerdponx wrote: post #9
leeroyjenkins11 wrote: post #4

It's interesting, I do have trouble using excess deaths and attributing it to covid though. I was in Honduras in the ultra poor mountain region in intibuca and the people there said the entire town got covid, but there was only one death. It's was a small town, but the area had well over 200 people. What did happen was that the government literally cut off access to the nearest city where people could get food, suppl…

I always thought that this was a feature of "excess death" analysis! It's the combined effect of the pandemic, not just the disease itself.

That's fine for historians, but useless for making decisions about interventions in the real world where there is always more than one confounding factor.

Re: Covid “Fudge Factor” – A map of Covid data corruption and approach that worked

#27

Post by boredumb »

>The United States was roughly around the global average. Contrary to the view of many conservatives, the deaths probably were caused by Covid itself, and NOT by lockdowns

I feel like the common view by people who thought numbers were being artificially inflated was that they were counting people who died while having tested positive for covid being attributed to covid and not just 'the lockdowns'

Fairly distinctly remember a million memes of like a car accident or something else tragic and a caption of "sorry to tell you mam, your son died of covid" or something to that ends.

Also remember hearing attribution to FEMA and other world health organizations offering relief and funding based on a death being covid related or not and so the thought was it was easier to check that box and receive relief to your hospital and get the family's funeral expenses paid for.

Re: Covid “Fudge Factor” – A map of Covid data corruption and approach that worked

#29

Post by r721 »

leeroyjenkins11 wrote: post #4

It's interesting, I do have trouble using excess deaths and attributing it to covid though. I was in Honduras in the ultra poor mountain region in intibuca and the people there said the entire town got covid, but there was only one death. It's was a small town, but the area had well over 200 people. What did happen was that the government literally cut off access to the nearest city where people could get food, suppl…

>one death

>over 200 people

That's like ~ 0.5% IFR which is quite close to the widely cited 0.68% IFR estimation (from 2020, for the original strain):

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33007452/

Re: Covid “Fudge Factor” – A map of Covid data corruption and approach that worked

#30

Post by MontyCarloHall »

nerdponx wrote: post #15
pluijzer wrote: post #10

What I know from the Netherlands, at least from the numbers of hospitalisations, is that for the longest time we counted the number of people that had covid while being treated in hospital. This in contrast with most countries that counted the number of people in hospital, because of covid.

I remember reading that they were doing this in the US as well during the very early days of the pandemic. If you happened to have Covid in the hospital when you died, you "died from Covid". This of course was perfect material for the Covid hoax conspiracy theorists...

For hospitalizations, at least, some states (e.g. New York [0]) did not start distinguishing between “hospitalized due to COVID” from “hospitalized with COVID” until early 2022.

[0] https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nys/central-ny/ny-state-of-pol...

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