OT Coronavirus: America in chaos, News and Updates. One million Americans dead and counting

How do you know it didn't work for Covid?

How do you know washing hands, social distancing, and masks didn't reduce covid sickness and death?

Just because these things appear to have even a great effect on the flu doesn't mean they didn't help with Covid.

I've said it over a dozen times in this thread, there are a lot of great scientific and medical data that will come from this for years.

Often large corporations have offered bonuses to employees to not use their sick time. Maybe incentivizing employees to come to work ill actually costs businesses more in overall workplace illnesses and productivity losses.

We're already seeing that by paying greater attention to in-hospital cleanliness and PPE has greatly reduced secondary infections.

Knowledge gained from tragedy is still beneficial.

 

1. Because healthcare professionals actually want to make people better.
2. Malpractice.
3. We have tests that quickly and accurately differentiate between the flu and covid.
4. Because many hospitals ran very low on the equipment and supplies needed to treat people with covid. Not doing simple blood work to find out what was wrong with the patient and how to treat them would have made that worse.
5. Because this was a pandemic and local hospitals were working with state and federal health officials. If hospitals would have been misreporting flu as covid it would have been quickly found out by state contact tracing.
6. Because testing sewage in waste treatment plants for disease supported the rise of covid and the lessoning of the flu.

I'm sure I could come up with more but these are off the top of my head.

Let's see what the googles have to say...

The claim: CDC admitted adding flu and pneumonia deaths to COVID-19 death count
A Facebook post claims the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention admitted adding flu and pneumonia deaths to the COVID-19 death count

Claims that the CDC “corrected” or “adjusted” the number of COVID-19 deaths to a lower number fuel conspiracy theories that the coronavirus pandemic is a hoax.

Conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza tweeted May 2, “Just like that, CDC reduces its #Coronavirus death count to 37,000. That’s nearly HALF the total they were peddling. Did 30,000 people spring back to life like Lazarus? No, this seems a 'gaffe' – defined as a case of the CDC accidentally telling the truth.” The post was retweeted more than 20,000 times.

USA TODAY reached out to the person who made the Facebook post and D’Souza for comment but did not receive a response.

Provisional deaths versus confirmed and probable deaths
As of April 14, the CDC regularly updates two measurements of COVID-19 deaths: provisional deaths (verified by death certificates) and confirmed and probable cases (deaths suspected to have been caused by COVID-19).

The number of provisional deaths is based on data from the National Vital Statistics System, used by the National Center for Health Statistics, which records information from death certificates. This number lags the number of confirmed and probable cases because, according to the CDC’s website, “it can take several weeks for death records to be submitted to (NCHS), processed, coded, and tabulated. Therefore, the data shown on this page may be incomplete, and will likely not include all deaths that occurred during a given time period, especially for the more recent time periods.”

Provisional deaths lag other counts by one or two weeks. The discrepancy has been a source of confusion in some of the posts claiming the CDC corrected or adjusted its count.

When a Twitter user tried to correct D’Souza’s tweet with a screenshot of the number of confirmed and probable cases, D’Souza responded with a screenshot of the number of provisional deaths, saying, “See for yourself,” as if the two numbers were the same calculation.

Uncertain counts
Experts acknowledge there has been widespread underreporting of COVID-19 deaths since the start of the pandemic, so any death tolls do not present the full picture.

Fact check:Is US coronavirus death toll inflated? Experts agree it's probably the opposite

The New York Times reported in April that although the extent of the problem is not clear, a lack of testing, varying requirements for testing, inconsistent protocols for reporting deaths at the local and state level and people dying before being tested means many COVID-19 deaths were never counted.

Coronavirus's annual death toll can't be calculated, compared

NPR reported in May that this issue has not improved. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in a Senate hearing that month the death count is “almost certainly" higher.

COVID-19 death counts have increased, not decreased
Despite incomplete death counts, archived versions of both of the CDC’s coronavirus death counts – provisional and confirmed and probable – have continued to increase since the virus started spreading. There have been no instances of either death count being significantly reduced, as claimed in the Facebook post.

Fact check:CDC's estimates COVID-19 death rate around 0.26%, doesn't confirm it

CDC’s reporting on pneumonia- or influenza-related COVID-19 deaths
The Facebook user claimed the CDC admitted “adding pneumonia and flu with COVID deaths.” This is not true, as Bob Anderson, NCHS chief of mortality statistics, confirmed to AFP Fact Check.

Fact check:CDC has not stopped reporting flu deaths, and this season's numbers are typical

The CDC has changed the extent and format in which it publicly displays death statistics relating to COVID-19 and the other illnesses, which may have contributed to confusion.

According to archived web pages, the CDC has displayed “deaths with pneumonia and COVID-19” next to the count of all provisional COVID-19 deaths since April 3. On April 24, the CDC added a column for deaths from pneumonia, influenza or COVID-19 in addition to the total of COVID-19 deaths.

the CDC’s website says. "Additionally, COVID-19 symptoms can be similar to influenza-like illness, thus deaths may be misclassified as influenza."
Despite these new variations, the total provisional count of deaths involving COVID-19 was not significantly reduced. The same goes for confirmed and probable deaths, which continued to increase.
Despite these new variations, the total provisional count of deaths involving COVID-19 was not significantly reduced. The same goes for confirmed and probable deaths, which continued to increase.

Our ruling: False
Although it’s unclear where the Facebook user found the numbers, the CDC did not lower the death count, nor did it admit adding influenza and pneumonia to its COVID-19 death count. The user may have confused the CDC’s additional reporting of influenza and pneumonia-related deaths or the fact that the CDC reports two different counts for COVID-19 deaths. We rate this claim FALSE because it is not supported by our research.



Our fact-check sources:​

• • Dinesh D’Souza tweet, May 2
  • Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Cases in the U.S.
  • New York Times: “Trump Suggests Virus Death Count Is Inflated. Most Experts Doubt It,” May 22, 2020
  • Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Daily Updates of Totals by Week and State
  • New York Times: “Official Counts Understate the U.S. Coronavirus Death Toll,” April 7, 2020
  • NPR: “Fauci Says U.S. Death Toll Is Likely Higher. Other COVID-19 Stats Need Adjusting, Too,” May 13, 2020
  • Wayback Machine: “Daily Updates of Totals by Week and State”
  • Wayback Machine: “Cases in the U.S.”
  • AFP Fact Check: "CDC does not add flu and pneumonia deaths to COVID-19 toll," June 23, 2020
  • Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Technical Notes

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news...nfusion-cdcs-covid-19-death-count/3254404001/​

 

Different countries approached how to control and reduce the spread of Covid in different ways and methods. Some choose not to try to reduce the spread at all. Also the rates of vaccines being available to countries is wildly different. As time passes and we get more and more real-world data we'll be able to see exactly what worked and how well it worked.

Comparing covid and flu rates between countries like New Zealand and Brazil will be fascinating because they took drastically different methods to address this.

Also as we move into fall and winter, kids back in school, parents at work, we'll get new data that will be interesting to compare to countries that haven't matched our vaccine rates.

 

It took us thousands of years to learn that we shouldn't shit and piss in the same place we get our drinking water. That caused many diseases and infections simply disappear overnight when we stop mixing those two.

Maybe the spread of some variants of the flu can be greatly reduced by being cleaner and avoiding each other if we think we're sick.

What we know now is the spread of things like the flu and MERSA are way down. This happened while we were taking drastic steps to reduce the spread of Covid. At first look, this does not seem to be a coincidence. That something(s) we did to stop and/or reduce the spread of covid was effective in other areas.

 

Covid and the flu don't really "spread the same way". Covid is significantly more transmissible.

It's a bit like saying "how come this deodorant covers up my BO, but when I got sprayed by a skunk, everyone held their noses and backed away? They are both odors, after all!"

barfo

 

How do you know they didn't count deaths from the Bill Gates vaccine microchip as car accidents?

barfo