CDC's (26 August 2020) COVID death certificate data — misinterpreted by President Trump and some of the public

© 2020 Peter Free

 

01 September 2020

 

 

CDC's latest COVID death certificate data — by causes

 

On 26 August, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) — which so far has done a fairly miserable job of COVID analysis and public information-giving — unwittingly extended that unfortunate trend with the following statement about its review of death certificates by purported medical cause.

 

The CDC innocently said that:

 

 

For 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned.

 

For deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average, there were 2.6 additional conditions or causes per death.

 

© 2020 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Weekly Updates by Select Demographic and Geographic Characteristics - Provisional Death Counts for Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) - Comorbidities, cdc.gov (26 August 2020)

 

 

People misinterpreted the CDC's 6 percent statement

 

President Trump was one:

 

 

Twitter removed a post that President Donald Trump retweeted Sunday because it contained a false claim about coronavirus death statistics, which violated the company’s rules.

 

The tweet, originally posted by a supporter of a baseless QAnon conspiracy theory, claimed that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released data that indicated only 6% of people listed as having died from COVID-19 “actually died” from the virus.

 

© 2020 Gray News, False COVID-19 claim retweeted by Trump removed from Twitter, nbc12.com (31 August 2020)

 

 

Anti-Empire jumped to the same conclusion

 

Here:

 

 

94% of people are dying with covid, per the CDC, not because of it.

 

© 2020 Clay Travis, CDC: 94% of Deaths With COVID Had Additional Causes (2-3 on Average), Anti-Empire (30 August 2020)

 

 

These interpretations are understandable, but blatantly wrong

 

Figuring that out — however — either requires a medical background, or a willingness to read on (in the CDC report) and interpret what is pretty well concealed among the CDC's poorly explained data.

 

The irony here is that the same hysteria — that the CDC, FDA, Big Pharma and the Establishment have intentionally created — is drawing non-medical people into reading what the CDC, often unnecessarily opaquely, says.

 

 

Figuring out COVID's various ways of killing people requires going . . .

 

. . . into the CDC's tables representing 'not-COVID-alone' causes of death.

 

Those causes include:

 

 

Respiratory diseases

Influenza and pneumonia

Chronic lower respiratory diseases

Other diseases of the respiratory system

 

Circulatory diseases

Hypertensive diseases

Ischemic heart disease

Heart failure

 

Cerebrovascular diseases

 

Malignant neoplasms

 

Alzheimer disease and dementia

 

Diabetes

 

Renal failure

 

Sepsis

 

© 2020 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Excess Deaths Associated with COVID-10 — Technical Notes — Cause of Death, cdc.gov (26 August 2020) (visited 31 August 2020)

 

 

If you have some medical knowledge . . .

 

. . . combined with having followed what we are discovering about how SARS-CoV-2 variously affects the human body — you will immediately see that most of the above 'not-COVID-alone' causes of death are exactly what SARS-CoV-2 creates — so as to finish us off.

 

COVID has the ability to greatly create or aggravate problems with just about all human physiological systems.

 

Among SARS-CoV-2's array of weapons is its ability to cause thrombotic complications in a wide range of bodily systems. The virus is impressively effective — and symptomatically wide-ranging — in the toll it reaps on the people whose age, comorbidities or physiologies are vulnerable to it.

 

Keep in mind also, with regard to quantification using death certificates — that death certificates are notoriously unreliable, when it comes to recording precisely attributed and accurately named causes of death.

 

Imagine — in the defense of busy physicians and medical examiners — how difficult it can often be to figure out what killed a person, in the routine absence of an autopsy.

 

In sum, COVID is causing way-way more than just 6 percent of reported deaths. The CDC could have done a better job of explaining this to the public.

 

 

Rather than interpreting death certificates . . .

 

"Excess deaths" is a better way to interpret COVID's death toll.

 

"Excess" meaning how many deaths — more than we ordinarily expect (during the same time period) — that the US and each of its states are experiencing, during the COVID pandemic.

 

To see graphical representations of those datasets, go to the following webpage:

 

 

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Excess Deaths Associated with COVID-19: Provisional Death Counts for Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) — Options, Select a dashboard, cdc.gov (26 August 2020)

 

 

On the "dashboard" represented on that page, the most immediately pertinent (in my estimation) is "Percent Excess Deaths".

 

 

From "excess deaths" data . . .

 

. . . we can see that the COVID pandemic is not entirely hype.

 

But how much of the hysteria is not hype — we cannot tell because no one in the United States has bothered to really look.

 

The CDC itself is guilty of this. For instance, with its recent discontinuation of asymptomatic testing recommendation.

 

 

Pragmatically speaking, for living people

 

One huge problem is that we do not yet know how to identify healthy-appearing folks, who might fall seriously victim to this virus's occasional rampage.

 

Whom (other than the elderly) do we protect — and to what degree of imposed societal inconvenience?

 

 

The moral? — It is not just 6 percent due to COVID . . .

 

. . . but the real COVID impact figure is still unknown.

 

The US continues to wallow in Big Pharma bribed-government and Establishment-sponsored epidemiological incompetence.

 

This Cultivated Ignorance Phenomenon is historically unprecedented.

 

The formerly 'can-do' United States obviously can't anymore.