Drowning in Coronavirus Research, Part 99

The penultimate in our series, one more and then who knows.  Maybe this will all magically go away.

The Wall Street Journal is on to the CDC data showing a large number of non-CV-19 deaths above the average.  (WSJ Story)   While some try to claim these are undiagnosed CV-19 deaths, that is just complete BS.  Everyone is getting tested, even after death.  These are lockdown and terrorification deaths, resulting from delays in getting care and in the case of Alzheimer’s and dementia, isolation deaths.  But don’t worry, these deaths don’t count, because they didn’t involve CV-19.  This year, only CV-19 deaths count.   I have shown you the specific charts from this data set for Minnesota.  It is the same everywhere.  Repeat after me, when the hysteria calms down and people actually decide who died from CV-19 and compare that to the toll from lockdowns and terrorification, the latter will cause many, many more deaths over the next few years.

And here is a related article from the UK.  (Lancet Article)   The authors were involved in referrals of deaths to coroners.   Of 67 deaths referred to them as sudden, unexpected causes, only 2 involved undiagnosed CV-19.  The rest were suicides, drug and alcohol overdoses, and situations where people avoided care for diseases like diabetes or heart failure, some who were specifically told to stay home rather than come in for an appointment.  They properly refer to these as lockdown deaths.

As I mentioned over the last couple of days, I am not the only person unhappy about the change in hospital data reporting, particularly taking away daily census, which makes it impossible to tell how many people are actually in the hospital for CV-19 on a day.  Here is a story regarding that.  (KSTP Story)

Thanks to a reader for providing this link, a very useful primer on vaccines for viruses.  Contains appropriate cautions about understanding how a vaccine actually works.   (AIER Paper)

And this is from something I don’t understand well, a Twitter thread reading app, whatever that is, but it is an explanation of Spain’s new policy for identifying and managing cases.   (Spain Policy)   Unfortunately my own Spanish isn’t quite good enough for me to do my own translation, but it appears that Spain is joining the trend of more sensible approaches to what is actually a likely infectious case, including not treating high cycle number test results as a case without some further clinical evidence.

And India has also had enough of low positives that are clinically and epidemiologically irrelevant.  Many doctors are insisting on getting the cycle number and using it to triage patients to watchful care at home or hospital admission.  Cycle numbers over 25 are treated as marginal.  (India Story)    Some doctors mentioned variability in how a sample is handled as a reason to ignore cycle number.

Everyone thinks South Korea handled the epidemic well and had few cases.  No, they just didn’t do a lot of testing of non-symptomatic people.  An antibody and PCR survey of 200 people with no history of symptoms or positive test and few contacts with infected people finds that prevalence was actually 7.6% and 15 of those tested were currently positive by PCR test.  All 200 plus people were asymptomatic.  (SK Story)   This suggests that there were 12 times more cases than reported as detected, in the usual ballpark.  So South Korea had a lot of asymptomatic cases, just like everywhere else.