Submitted by Dan Schultz – April 7, 2020
Mark Twain said, “There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damned lies, and Statistics.”
“The numbers are almost meaningless,” (1)
— Steve Goodman, MD, MHS, PhD. Stanford University Professor of Epidemiology
“With a population of 1.5 billion people, China’s some 80,000 cases look like a rounding error” (1)
–Nigam Shah, Stanford University Assistant Professor of Biomedical Statistics at
Of course, we can’t trust any of the number we get from China, as they have proved to be consistently deceitful, but one could make the argument that, generally, our government, politicians and policymakers are, too.
“99% of Those Who Died From Virus Had Other Illness, Italy Says,” Bloomberg reports, (2)
A recent study released (3) by Italy’s national health authority found that nearly everyone who was pronounced dead from COVID-19 was already struggling with serious chronic disease(s). The average age of deaths, 78.
“There does not seem to be anything special about this particular epidemic of influenza-like illness.”
–Tom Jefferson Epidemiologist, based in Rome. Advisor to the Italian National Agency for Regional Health Services.
“Report shows up to 88% of Italy’s alleged COVID 19 deaths could be misattributed. Only 12% of ‘COVID 19 deaths’ actually list COVID 19 as cause. “ (4) (5)
How Do They Go About Counting?
“The way in which we code deaths in our country is very generous in the sense that all the people who die in hospitals with the coronavirus are deemed to be dying of the coronavirus.” (4)
–Prof Walter Ricciardi, MD, PhD, Scientific Adviser to Italy’s Minister of Health (6)
This paper, issued from the US National Vital Statistics System, has altered the way deaths are tabulated, with bias (7)
“COVID-19 should be reported on the death certificate for all decedents where the disease caused or is assumed to have caused or contributed to death. … “However, the rules for coding and selection of the underlying cause of death are expected to result in COVID-19 being the underlying cause.”
In other words, the numbers are based expectations and assumptions, not actual verification. This inappropriate method produces inaccurate results
Testing
No testing
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, M.D published in the New England Journal of Medicine (8) that reported case fatality rates of COVID-19 … are based on case definitions requiring a diagnosis of pneumonia.
In other words, diagnosis is symptom based, and pneumonia cases are counted as COVID-19 now.
It is a kind of statistical sleight of hand, written/admitted right in the report. Read it for yourself.
If you take the time to read scientific papers about COVID-19, they say things like:
“our study does not fulfill Koch’s postulates” (9) (Koch’s Postulate is the definitive protocol used in science to verify causation.) and “we did not perform tests for detecting infectious virus in blood” (10)
Inaccuracy of Tests
Test kits are notoriously inaccurate. It is not a binary test and these tests are very subjective with many false positives and false negatives documented. For instance:
(Jan 31) A woman returning to Canada from China tested negative while “mildly ill” after arriving in Canada, but later tested positive.
(Feb 16) An 83-year old American woman was screened as disease free after leaving a cruise ship but tested positive twice after arrival in Malaysia. Ironically, her husband had pneumonia, but tested negative. Nobody on the ship was sick, nor had travelled to mainland China recently.
(Mar 1) Newsweek reported an American man tested negative upon return from Wuhan, China, without any symptoms. But later he was “weakly positive” and was returned to quarantine.
Look on the back of the test kits (for COVID-19). Hidden away in the supplementary material of reference [11], where few people will see it, it exposes some important issues with the test. It says:
–The test is not binary (negative/positive) and has an arbitrary cutoff.
–The quantity of RNA does not correlate with illness.
–If negative means uninfected and positive means infected, then people went from infected to uninfected and back again, sometimes several times.
Background mortality (12) is the most important statistic to measure the severity of pandemics and no one seems to be talking about it. How many people died in the US, a particular State or County the last few years and compare to how many died this year? I can’t find anyone gathering those numbers. I suspect that won’t make newspaper headlines.
Did you keep track the numbers of colds or flu cases that happened in previous years? You didn’t. You didn’t because it would have been relatively meaningless and irrelevant. Just like this year.
Counting deaths alone creates fear in people, but by being reminded daily of them we also become a spectator, captivated by the specter. If you just read headlines chances are you’ll know just enough to be mislead – and scared.
| References:
1. Confirmed Coronavirus Cases Is an ‘Almost Meaningless’ Metric. Bloomberg (LINK) |
7. National Vital Statistics System. COVID-19 Alert No. 2March 24, 2020 New ICD code introduced for COVID-19 deaths https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvss/coronavirus/Alert-2-New-ICD-code-introduced-for-COVID-19-deaths.pdf 8. Anthony S. Fauci N Engl J Med 2020; 382:1268-1269 Covid-19 — Navigating the Uncharted, March 26, 2020 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2002387 9. Zhu N et al. A Novel Coronavirus from Patients with Pneumonia in China, 2019. N Engl J Med. 2020 Jan 14. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2001017 10. Huang C et al. Clinical features of patients infected with 2019 novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China. Lancet. 2020 Jan 24. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30183-5/fulltext 11. Young BE et al. Epidemiologic Features and Clinical Course of Patients Infected With SARS-CoV-2 in Singapore. JAMA. 2020 Mar 3. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762688 12. Background Mortality https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8096574 |
Regards,
Dan Schultz
Maitreya Mountain Village
www.maitreyamountainvillage.com
(707) 954-7743
As time passes, “the medical experts” who have been so prominent in pushing the “Oh my God, we are all going to die if we don’t shelter in place and exercise social distancing” seem less able to explain why nothing remotely close to the projected numbers of massive death and hospitalizations has happened. They also don’t seem to be able to explain why Japan, Sweden, and many other countries did not have massive death and hospitalizations while not resorting to stay at home and social distancing. Japan and Sweden, less than 150 deaths as an example. Many other troubling numbers that can’t seem to be explained nor are the “experts” able to offer explanations. In fact most experts seem to be dodging questions about why their numbers have been so far off.
Yet in all of this, very few in the media seem to be aware of this troubling and growing evidence that the numbers are way off. If fact most media outlets continue with the doom and gloom message. In view of the clear evidence that American media has been wrong in so many instances, why do so many people still seem to be panicked over the Covid-19 virus when it is becoming clearer by the day that it was no more a medical pandemic than the common flu.
Currently, worldwide there are 1.5 million people who have contracted Covid-19. In a typical common flu season, 1.5 to 2 million people in the United States alone contract the common flu. I have yet to see a “medical expert” talking about Covid-19 in comparison to flu numbers offer any reason why the measures currently being employed for Covid-19 are not employed every flu season. Quite the contrary, most “experts” seem completely oblivious to numbers that have existed for decades.
Of course if you have the temerity to suggest that we are engaged in tilting at windmills, your morals are questioned, or you don’t care about the people who are dying. There isn’t any possibility that “experts” can be questioned, because they know so much more than any one who questions them. I’m sorry, but these are the “experts” that can not even keep their stories straight in a segment on TV let alone by the week or even by the day. Wake up people, Dan is absolutely right in calling this travesty into question.
Have spent the past three weeks reading and watching the growing evidence that we have been stampeded into believing that the Covid-19 virus was some kind of super virus which it is not! Seems pretty convenient to have begun to be orchestrated by media at the end of February.
I agree that the numbers do not come close to justifying the reaction by both health and government officials. We as a Country will sustain far more loss of life from the unintended consequences of what is considered “justifiable actions in the name of safety for the American people from the virus” than from letting the virus run its course naturally. Something we have done for the various forms of flu and the common cold for centuries without shutting the country down.
Some countries in the world are already lifting economy choking “stay at home” or “social distancing” measures and reopening businesses. Others never resorted to this kind of social tinkering, media driven panic and will likely suffer far less than here in the US.
This is a continuation of media run amok which has plagued the US for years! After so much obvious distortion of facts just in recent memory how can the American people and their respective leadership have any faith in what is being offered by the media? Where are the questions being asked? Why has there been no effort by any, but a few in the wilderness, asking about the increasingly obvious fact that the numbers support the underwhelming nature of this virus and seem to confirm it to be not of any kind of serious threat!!! Why are all of the so called “talking heads and medical experts” in the media not called out when their predictions have proven to be far beyond merely slightly wrong? Why have not more Americans not stood up and said enough is enough? Let’s end this media driven charade and admit that Covid-19 is just another virus that requires nothing more than behaving responsibly in a normal flu season like conscious manner.
Americans should be tired of constantly being led astray by abysmal journalistic narratives instead of objective truth. Tired of being prevented from asking obvious questions and being excoriated for even questioning those “woke” experts on the evening “news”. Why exactly are they being given a “pass” when their objective analysis is so quickly found to be completely wrong? And finally why are those that point out the glaring errors being called charlatans and snake oil peddler’s when they are more than likely closer to the truth than the evening news and their experts!!!!!