Debunking the False Claim That COVID Death Counts Are Inflated Public Comment from Andy HudakAimee Brunckhorst
From: Andy <andyhudak@montanasky.net>
Sent: Monday, October 26, 2020 12:51 PM
To: Andy Hudak
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Debunking the False Claim That COVID Death Counts Are Inflated (Scientific
American)
It is sad to me that I even need to pass this around, but there is so much disinformation on the
Internet, and in our valley (In spite of VRY concerning numbers re hospital capacity), I don't
know who gets what, so here you go ... (Now, I know the people that don't believe in science, or
think that all of the coroners in all of the counties in all of the states would risk their entire
career and break their professional ethics to inflate the numbers, but what can I say... If you
believe that, I have a viaduct to sell you in Whitefish! :-)
Your freedoms end where you can cause me to have a fatal disease. (No different from me
creating a drainfield that drains on to your property. One below ground and one above is all!)
OR if you decide to incinerate materials that could diminish the lung capacity of our children!
The U S Supreme court also weighed in on freedom of speech in a similar way - IF you engage
in behavior that can harm others, there is no right of free speech. Their example —yelling fire
in a movie theater.
Our beliefs are not science, and the virus couldn't care less about our beliefs!
In the absence of a national comprehensive health plan of support for eight months now, it's
up to the cities and counties to do our best with the resources we have. History will name
them as the heroes that saved hundreds of thousands of lives!
Currently, if we are about to double the number of cases in three months (by the end of the
year) that we had in six months since this started. Unless we curb what we are doing, we are
on track to have more deaths in our population than we did during World War II!
The true hoax is comparing the current amount of death to the forecast of 2 million! Anyone
who was paying attention knows that the 2 million death from coronavirus figure was always a
fiction, as it was the forecast for what would happen if our president, Senate, House of
Representatives, governor, county commissioners, or mayor would do NOTHING.
Independent studies have already established that between 100,000 and 150,000 Americans
have already died for nothing!
This past Friday and Saturday our nation broke records for the number of daily cases —deaths,
as always, will follow into -four weeks!
My personal opinion is that all of the politicians that do not follow the science are guilty of
manslaughter.
Even if never prosecuted, there is a moral/ethical imperative about doing everything we canto
not harm our fellow Americans —whether they believe the science or not!
Feel free to pass this information/analysis from Scientific American on...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/debunking-the-false-claim-that-covid-death-counts-are-
inflated/?utm source=newsletter&utm medium=email&utm campaign=health&utm content=link&utm term=2020-10-26 featured-this-
week&saMailinEI D=69073568&saUserl D=ODExNTYvMzlzMTMS1&saJobl D=1982938718&saReaortld=MTk4M ikzODcxOAS2
PUBLIC HEALTH
Debunking the False Claim That COVID Death Counts Are Inflated
President Trump, a congressman and conspiracy fantasists have repeated the myth. But three kinds of evidence point to
more than 2i8,000 U.S. deaths
Getty Images
A persistent falsehood has been circulating on social media: the number of COVID deaths is much
lower than the official statistic of more than 218,000, and therefore the danger of the disease has been
overblown. In August President Trump retweeted a post claiming that only 6 percent of these
reported deaths were actually from COVID-19. (The tweet originated from a follower of the debunked
conspiracy fantasy QAnon.) Twitter removed the post for containing false information, but
fabrications such as these continue to spread. U.S. Representative Roger Marshall of
2
Kansas complained in September that Facebook had removed a post in which he claimed that 94
percent of COVID-19 deaths reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention "were the
result of 2-3 additional serious illnesses and were of advanced age."
Now some facts: Researchers know beyond a doubt that the number of COVID-19 deaths in the U.S.
have surpassed 200,000. These numbers are supported by three lines of evidence, including death
certificates. The inaccurate idea that only 6 percent of the deaths were really caused by the
coronavirus is "a gross misinterpretation" of how death certificates work, says Robert Anderson, lead
mortality statistician at the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics.
The scope of the coronavirus's deadly toll is clear, even if final numbers will not be known until the
pandemic is over. "We're pretty confident about the scale and order of magnitude of deaths, but we're
not clear on the exact number yet," says Justin Lessler, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. To understand why the figures contain some
uncertainty, it is important to know how they are collected and calculated.
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The first source of death data is called case surveillance. Health care providers are required to report
cases and deaths from certain diseases, including measles, mumps and now COVID-19, to their state's
health department, which, in turn, passes this information along to the CDC, Anderson says. The
surveillance data are a kind of "quick and dirty" accounting, says Shawna Webster, executive director
of the National Association for Public Health Statistics and Information Systems. The states gather all
the information they can on these diseases, but this is the first pass of the accounting —no one has
time to double-check the information or look for missing lab tests, she says. For that, you have to look
for the next source of information: vital records.
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This chart shows deaths per week far the top 10 cause:
rankings 'Plus COVID-19 and a provisional category fo
(That category includes cases pending COVID-19 test c
by public health officials). For two weeks in April, more ,
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Credit: Youyou Zhou; Sources: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Center for
Health Statistics
This second line of evidence comes from the National Vital Statistics System, which records birth and
death certificates. When somebody dies, a death certificate is filed in the state where the death
occurred. And after the records are registered at a state level, they are sent to the National Center for
Health Statistics, which tracks deaths at a national level. Death certificates are not filed in the system
until outstanding test results are in and the information is as complete as possible. By the time a
record gets to the vital records system, "it is as close to perfect as it's going to get," Webster says.
A physician, medical examiner or coroner fills out the cause of mortality on the death certificate, and
they are instructed to include only those conditions that caused or contributed to death, Anderson
says. One field lists the sequence of events leading to the death. "What we're really trying to get at is
the condition or disease that started the chain of events leading to the death," Anderson says. "For
COVID-19, that might be something like acute respiratory distress due to pneumonia due to COVID-
19." A second part of the certificate lists other significant conditions that may have contributed to the
death yet were not part of the sequence of events that led up to it, he says. These are called
comorbidities, and while they can be contributing factors, they cannot be directly involved in the
chain of cause and effect that ended in death. Preexisting medical conditions such as diabetes or heart
disease are common comorbidities, and they can make a person more vulnerable to the coronavirus,
Anderson says, "but the fact is: they're not dying from that preexisting condition."
"When we ask if COVID killed somebody, it means `Did they die sooner than they would have if they
didn't have the virus?"' Lessler says. Even such a person with a potentially life -shortening preexisting
condition such as heart disease or diabetes may have lived another five, 10 or many more years, had
they not become infected with COVID-19.
The 6 percent number touted by Trump and QAnon comes from a weekly CDC report stating that in 6
percent of the coronavirus mortality cases it counted, COVID-19 was the only condition listed on the
death certificate. That observation likely means that those death certificates were incomplete because
the certifiers only gave the underlying cause of death and not the full causal sequence that led to it,
Anderson says. Even someone who does not have a preexisting condition and dies from COVID-19
will also have comorbidities in the form of symptoms, such as respiratory failure, caused by the
coronavirus. The idea that a death certificate with ailments listed in addition to COVID-19 means that
the person did not really die from the virus is simply false, Anderson says.
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The surveillance and vital statistics data provide a pretty good picture of how many deaths are
attributable to the coronavirus, but they do not capture all of them, and that is where the final line of
evidence come in: excess deaths. They are the number of deaths that occur above and beyond the
historical pattern for that time period, says Steven Woolf, a physician and population health
researcher at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine. In a paper published
in JAMA this month, Woolf and his colleagues examined death records in the U.S. from March 1
through August 1 and compared them with the expected mortality numbers. They found that there
was a 20 percent increase in deaths during this time period —for a total of 225,53o excess deaths —
compared with previous years.
Two thirds of these cases were attributed to COVID-19 on the death certificates, and Woolf says there
are two types of explanations for the rest: Some of them were COVID-19 deaths that simply were not
documented as such, perhaps because the person died at home and was never tested or because the
certificate was miscoded. And some of the extra deaths were probably a consequence of the pandemic
yet not necessarily the virus itself. For instance, he says, imagine a patient with chest pain who is
scared to go to the hospital because they do not want to get the virus and then dies of a heart attack.
Woolf calls this "indirect mortality." "The deaths aren't literally caused by the virus itself but the
pandemic is claiming lives," he says.
The numbers in Woolf s study come from provisional death data, the kind that the CDC has not yet
checked for miscoding or other issues, so it comes with some degree of imprecision. What builds his
confidence in these results, however, is the fact that they have been replicated numerous times by his
group and others. "All serious analyses of these data are showing that the number of deaths we're
hearing on the news is an undercount," he says.
Read Our Latest Issue
Read Now
COVID-19 is now the third leading cause of death in the U.S. Whether the deaths add up to 218,511,
219,681 or 219,541—as reported by the CDC, Johns Hopkins University and the New York
Times, respectively, on October 19—it's a staggering number of lives cut short.
Read more about the coronavirus outbreak from Scientific American here. And read coverage from
our international network of magazines here.
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Peace ... (Inside ourselves first, then out there in the world, eh?
Warmly,
Andy
Andy Hudak III
MSOTA Founding Member; Clinical Member #001; ATSA Clinical Member; MSOTA Legislative
Chair
PO Box 1763
Whitefish, IVIT 59937
w: (406) 862-1112 CONTACT Tanya (Admin Asst)-.
"Follow your heart but take your brain with you."
-- Alfred Adler
"We cannot make anyone else change. However, learning non -power and control relationship
skills within safe, empathetic, and compassionate relationships, almost always leads to choices
to grow towards our most resilient and integrated selves." :-)
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