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

He doesn't want to die.

 

Oh man, really? Hospitals are not falsely claiming people have covid when they don't. Please don't go full Maris on us.

https://www.aha.org/news/blog/2020-...lse-claims-about-covid-19-deaths-and-payments

 

The most-vaccinated big counties in America are beating the worst of the coronavirus

Much has been written about the yawning gap in outcomes between less-vaccinated and more-vaccinated areas, especially as deaths in less-vaccinated, red states significantly and increasingly outpace more-vaccinated, blue states. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump also reported this week that deaths in red counties are more than 50 percent higher than in blue counties.



But even that might undersell just how beneficial vaccination is in preventing the worst that the coronavirus has to offer — particularly when adopted on a grand scale in a given area.

From the start of the vaccination effort, a pertinent question has been when we might achieve something amounting to “herd immunity,” i.e. having enough people vaccinated to stomp out the virus. Guesstimates often pegged that number at 70 percent or above. That concept has proven elusive, particularly as the delta variant has rendered the vaccines less effective at preventing the spread — while still extremely effective at preventing hospitalizations and deaths.

But those latter metrics remain hugely important. And in the densely populated areas in which we’ve approached overwhelming adoption of the vaccines, the death rates are often a fraction of the national average — a significantly greater gap than between the most-vaccinated and least-vaccinated states.



Perhaps the most highly vaccinated large county in America, according to New York Times data, is Montgomery County, Md., just outside the District of Columbia. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show 93 percent of those 12 and older there are fully vaccinated, compared to around 70 percent nationally. The number dying over the past week is eight times as high nationally — 3.4 per 1 million — as it is in Montgomery County — 0.4 per 1 million — even as Montgomery County is near some virus hotspots.

The relative rate is similar in two of the handful of other most-vaccinated large counties in the country: Dane County, Wis. (home to Madison), where 86 percent of people 12 and older are fully vaccinated, per the CDC, and San Francisco, where 84 percent are vaccinated. Dane County also has 0.4 deaths per 1 million despite being in one of the most hard-hit regions, the Midwest.


Slightly fewer people 12 and over are vaccinated in New York City, though still north of 80 percent. Over the past week, it has registered a per-capita death rate about one-third the national average.



Similar to New York City are Multnomah County, Ore. (home to Portland), with its 84 percent full vaccination rate; Alameda County, Calif. (home to Oakland) at 84 percent; and Santa Clara County, Calif. (home to San Jose) at 81 percent. In each case, there is about 1 death per 1 million people, compared to 3-per-1-million at the national level (as well as more than 3 deaths per million statewide in Oregon and more than 2 per million in California).

There are some larger, highly vaccinated counties with rates that are comparable to the national average. These come particularly in the Denver area — Denver itself (79 percent fully vaccinated, 3 deaths per 1 million) and Boulder County (79 percent vaccinated, 2 deaths per 1 million) — and in Minneapolis-based Hennepin County (78 percent vaccinated, 3 deaths per 1 million).

But they also come in slightly less-vaccinated counties than the above and in states that are significantly more hard-hit than the rest of the broader country right now. These counties’ per capita death rates are also still about half or less compared to the rest of their states (more than 6 deaths per million in Colorado and 7 deaths per million in Minnesota).

So while the most-vaccinated states are significantly, incontrovertibly and increasingly better off than the less-vaccinated states, the difference is even starker at the county and city level — and even as many of these highly vaccinated counties also happen to be the most densely populated.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...pc_uImdxSf-BHoRNI23suppdnKXpuwQw1vEZ0Zn_VCpXY

 

Fact check: 94% of individuals with additional causes of death still had COVID-19


Shared thousands of times on Facebook, posts claim that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) “quietly updated” its COVID-19 data “to admit that only 6% of all the 153,504 (U.S.) deaths recorded actually died from (COVID-19).” According to the posts, the CDC stated that the other 94% of people died from other causes, and that only 9,210 people have died from COVID-19. This claim is false.



Examples of this claim can be found here , here , and here .

The posts began circulating on social media in late August 2020 as the number of recorded U.S. deaths related to the novel coronavirus topped 180,000 ( here ).

President Donald Trump, downplaying the pandemic’s domestic death toll ahead of the Nov. 3 election, shared the claim on Aug. 30 ( here ) in a Tweet that has since been removed by Twitter ( here ).

EXPLAINING COMORBIDITY
The claim that the CDC “admitted that only 6% of… (COVID-19-related) deaths recorded actually died from Covid” is false, because the remaining 94% of cases were instances of comorbidity (the existence of two or more conditions or illnesses in a patient). This does not exclude COVID-19, but combines it with other illnesses, often triggered by the new coronavirus itself.

Iterations of the claim on Facebook include an authentic screenshot of a dataset on comorbidities from the CDC’s provisional COVID-19 death count page ( here ). Although text above Table 3 says, “For 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned,” the CDC did not mean that the other 94% of individuals did not die from novel coronavirus infection.

The table’s left-most column, labeled “Conditions Contributing to Deaths where COVID-19 was listed on the death certificate,” includes both serious complications from COVID-19 infection -- such as respiratory failure, pneumonia, and adult respiratory distress syndrome ( here ) – as well as pre-existing conditions that increase the risk of severe illness from COVID-19, such as diabetes and obesity ( here ).


An emailed statement to Reuters from the Mortality Statistics Branch at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) said death certificates, filled out by a physician, medical examiner, or coroner, list any causes or conditions that contributed to the person’s death, determined based on the medical expertise of that professional. The condition “that began the chain of events that ultimately led to the person’s death” is considered the person’s “underlying cause of death.”

In these cases, this would be COVID-19.

The NCHS statement broke down the death certificates mentioning COVID-19. For 94% of people who had COVID-19 also had other conditions listed. COVID-19 alone was cause of death for 6%.

Dr. Maja Artandi ( here ), medical director of the Stanford CROWN Clinic for COVID-19 patients ( here ), told Reuters via email that the CDC’s numbers “are really not a big surprise,” as “patients who have a comorbidity such as diabetes, hypertension or obesity have a higher risk of getting seriously ill and dying from COVID-19.” The numbers are also consistent with the fact that the novel coronavirus “can cause severe damage to the organs in the body such as the lungs, which then leads to respiratory failure and death.”

Key to understanding the issues in these posts is that, “If they had not gotten the infection,” Dr. Artandi said, “they would still be alive.”

Dr. Marc Larsen, an emergency medicine physician who serves as Incident Command Operations Chair for COVID-19 at St. Luke’s Hospital in Kansas City, Kansas ( here ), told Reuters via email that when filling out death certificates, physicians will typically use a standard format and list the primary cause of death as well as other contributing factors.

He provided an analogy to someone dying of a gunshot wound whose death certificate might list gunshot wound, along with hemorrhagic shock and liver laceration, as causes of death, with homelessness (associated with more exposure to potential violence, here ), as a contributing factor. For someone who died of COVID-19, the death certificate might read COVID-19, as well as pneumonia and Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) as causes of death, with diabetes and hypertension as contributing factors.


Dr. Larsen said that in both cases, “without those two triggers,” a gunshot wound and COVID-19, “the death would not have occurred. Nothing that appears after those primary diagnoses would have transpired had it not been for the primary event. In these examples, the patients did not die directly from being homeless or being diabetic with hypertension, however, they were contributing factors.”

On Sept. 1, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), debunked the claim on ABC’s Good Morning America ( here ).

Asked to explain “why the president would retweet a theory that suggests only 9,000 people have died of COVID-19,” Fauci said, “The point that the CDC was trying to make was that a certain percentage of (Americans who have died of COVID-19) had nothing else but just COVID. That does not mean that someone who has hypertension or diabetes who dies of COVID didn’t die of COVID-19. They did.”

He then confirmed that the recorded 180,000 American deaths “are real deaths from COVID-19.”

DATA LAGS AND DEATH COUNT ISSUES
At the time the screenshot in the posts was taken, the provisional COVID-19 death count was at 153,504. Using Wayback Machine, an Internet archive tool, this number reflected CDC data as of August 15 and was on the CDC’s website from August 17 ( here ).

As explained by the CDC here, COVID-19 death counts may vary “as data currently are lagged by an average of 1–2 weeks.” Because the data here comes from processed death certificates, a note under Table 1 explains, “this delay can range from 1 week to 8 weeks or more, depending on the jurisdiction, age, and cause of death.”


(Data collected using other methodologies, such as the CDC COVID Data Tracker here or the tracking tool provided by Reuters here may therefore reflect a higher COVID-19 death count.)

The posts also falsely allege that the CDC “quietly updated” its COVID-19 data in August to say that “for 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned.” The page included the latest comorbidity data as early as May 8, at that time reporting that 7% of deaths had COVID-19 listed as the sole cause of death ( here ). The NCHS also told Reuters it has been publishing this information since it began posting data on COVID-19 deaths on its website.

The posts claim most recorded COVID-19 deaths were individuals of “very advanced age”. While 79% of the 161,392 deaths recorded by the provisional CDC death count were of those over 65 years old, 31.5%, or less than a third, were of those over 85 (see Table 3 here ).

VERDICT
False. The 6% figure represents death certificates with COVID-19 listed as the only cause of death, but the remaining death certificates listed additional conditions, either COVID-19 complications or pre-existing illnesses, along with COVID-19.

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-...ses-of-death-still-had-covid-19-idUSKBN25U2IO