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Coronavirus: the world is crazy

The first correct data on mortality from coronavirus appeared. These are statistics from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Please look at the table below: the left column with the number of deaths among those confirmed for coronavirus - 13 130 people; third from the right with the number of deaths with pneumonia in the presence of COVID-19 - 5902 people. The difference is more than 2 times! That is, the number of deaths from coronavirus in the United States is at least 2 times less than is commonly believed by the majority.



I'm already a month been saying about the death of the coronavirus and death when coronavirus - are two different things. In order to understand this, you do not need to be a virologist or epidemiologist. It was enough just to read the WHO reportand see the memo about crude mortality ratio and infection mortality rate . Despite the fact that my two previous articles collected more than one and a half million views only on Habré, many disagreed with me.

They called me names, insulted me, and said that people like me should be in prison and other nasty things. Colleagues, I do not complain, do not reproach and do not boast. This is not the first year I have been engaged in analytics and in recent years I have spent hundreds of hours studying the data of a pandemic. This is my last manifesto on the topic. I urge you to either carefully read the subsequent text or completely ignore it.

UFO Care Minute


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The world has fallen victim to WHO’s flagrant negligence. A global system error has occurred. All information resources have riveted our attention to the terrible list of infected and dead, which everyone can fall into. We observe it as we did not observe the medal standings during the Olympics, not realizing that the coronavirus has nothing to do with a certain number of deaths from this list.

WHO statistics completely lack methodological integrity. If I start tagging people with an indelible red marker, then in days or weeks , victims will also appear on my list . And if I deliberately go to nursing homes, then I will increase mortality in my sample. This is exactly what we observe when looking at mortality incoronavirus in Italy and Germany equal to 12.9% and 2.5%, respectively.

Of course, mortality depends on the demographic characteristics of the population, climatic zones, the level of the economy, the quality of medicine and other things. However, such a fatal difference from the same virus between two almost neighboring European countries cannot be in principle. We definitely do not look at the lethality of the infection, but at the features of testing in different cohorts.

I will clarify the terminology: mortality rate is a statistical indicator that estimates the number of deaths; mortality (case fatality rate) - an indicator of medical statistics equal to the ratio of the number of deaths from a particular disease to the total number of people who have the same diagnosis. Coronavirus is not a diagnosis. The list of victims that we see on all federal channels and major publications is not a list of people who died directly from COVID-19.



The ratio of tested carriers of coronavirus and deceased indicates mortality, not lethality of the infection. The CDC table mentioned above is direct evidence of this. However, not everyone is still aware of this. For example, Russian Minister of Health Mikhail Albertovich Murashko in an interview with Mr. Pozner clearly speaksabout mortality of coronavirus from 1% to 9% in different countries. This is a fundamental error in the interpretation of statistics, because this value is the basis for all further decisions.

I understand perfectly well that the minister does not have time to study the reports on his own. It would be fair to blame the relevant departments for the carelessness, but if the mistake was replicated almost all over the world, then the primary responsibility lies with the organizer of the pandemic information - with WHO. The lethality of the infection is clearly overrated. And if it is overrated, then how rational are the measures taken to combat it?

A week ago, videos were distributed on the network with dozens or even hundreds of ambulances that waited many hours for the registration of patients. Many who saw these shots were seized by panic and thoughts about the impotence of mankind in front of a new threat. However, in emergency situations, the ambulance with flashing lights will drive at point-blank range to the reception department without any bureaucratic procedures and the paramedic will not calmly smoke near the car.

This means that not everyone needed urgent hospitalization. In Israel, for example, for an erroneous call (when it seemed that you feel bad, but doctors say the opposite), a considerable fine is written. This measure reduces the average time of arrival of ambulances. Now think about how many people died that day due to the logistic error described. And this is really a mistake, since the transport collapse happened only once and we do not observe it daily.

Among my friends there are many doctors from different cities of Russia and the same Israel. I know a lot of similar stories about how the forced redistribution of health care resources in connection with the coronavirus is fatal for the system itself. However, in statistics there is no word “I” and specific numbers are able to illustrate the stalemate of the current situation much brighter.


reference Information
Emergency Department Visits , -, - - CDC.
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  • ILI Influenza-like Illness — , [≥100○F], / .


Between 10 and 11 weeks, the number of visits to hospitals in New York, New Jersey and Puerto Rico with suspected pneumonia and flu almost doubled. At the same time, the number of people with a positive coronavirus test for the same period in all states increased only from 657 to 3471, and in many of them COVID-19 was asymptomatic. I hope that it is now clear to everyone that the overload of ambulances in the United States was caused not by the number of people in need of treatment, but by an excessive amount of effort devoted to diagnosis.

Further forest. A week later, doubling again occurred. But the worst thing is that the total number of hospital visits for all kinds of reasons has been reduced by one and a half times! Well, it can’t be that the average number of people potentially in need of emergency medical care suddenly drops by tens of thousands just like that! This is understandable to any specialist who understands the attribution of marketing channels, a sane entrepreneur, and even just a layman familiar with analytics.

The high probability that hundreds or thousands of people who really need help have lost it - this is only part of the trouble. A high hospitalization rate leads to the spread of nosocomial pneumonia, with which more than 30,000 deaths are associated per year, according to the United States . Already in Italydoctors warn that it was hospitals that could be the main spreading agents of infection at the very beginning.

Together with all this, the overall quality of medical services is naturally falling. Think about what kind of chaos would be in the health care system if every doctor who had no symptoms would not be allowed to work when he confirmed the flu virus. An even worse situation is when thousands of doctors quit because of fear of coronavirus, provoked by the irresponsibility of journalists and everyone else.



After all that has been written, I suspect that there will still be people who will say that the mortality rate (CFR) of a coronavirus reaches astronomical 13%. But ourworldindata.org are mistaken, despite the fact that this project is being developed with the support of the eminent Oxford and Y Combinator. Learn the definition of the term on Wikipedia or from WHO in relation to cholera.

Some more of you may find data on mortality from flu, measured in percent fractions , and contrast this to mortality in coronavirus. But this cannot be compared! In the first case, the entire population is used as the denominator; in the second, a random sampling. Look at the resultmassive US government study of influenza:



Mortality among hospitalized varies from 2.3% to 4.1% depending on the season. And the graph on the right shows us that the elderly are also at risk. They will always be at risk, because they do not have young organisms! I’m also sure that there is a certain correlation between hospitalized and insurance policies among them, because free medicine in the USA is available only to people over 65 under the Medicare program.

Mortality in coronavirus among all ages in the United States is 4.5%, for people over 65 it is 9.1%. But this is total mortality! If we use the death toll with pneumonia in the numeratorin the presence of COVID-19, the indicator will be half as much. Meanwhile, mortality (CFR) of pneumonia in the elderly is 12.5%, according to the NCBI . Now everyone understands that it is impossible to determine CFR from the WHO list?



I also want to repeat that it is impossible to compare mortality from pneumonia in the presence of coronavirus with mortality from pneumonia in general, since the first sample is still unrepresentative to determine the risk of a new infection across the entire population. After all, if a person was tested on COVID-19, then with a high probability he already had symptoms that served as a reason to go and take the test.

However, many SARS-CoV-2 is asymptomatic, and the true number of undiagnosed carriers of coronavirus is unknown to anyone. It is not without reason that German scientists conducted panel samples in the foci of the epidemic among all, and not only among the infected, and indicated a mortality rate of 0.37%. Similar results are reported by studies by a group of institutes in France, the University of Santa Clara , and Stanford .



Look closely at the number of infected and deaddisaggregated by age. Compare the number of deaths from pneumonia with the number of deaths from pneumonia in the presence of coronavirus. Pay attention to the number of fatal cases with influenza at a young age. Do not forget to look at the total number of deaths. Consider the circumstances in which the US healthcare system is currently living. Do you now understand that WHO lists have no information value for you?


Summary of Noteworthy US News
Hospitals say feds are seizing masks and other coronavirus supplies without a word.
Army field hospital for Covid-19 surge leaves Seattle after 9 days. It never saw a patient.
The 1,000-Bed Comfort Was Supposed to Aid New York. It Has 20 Patients.
Health clinic exec says offer to help NYC with beds, equipment is being ignored.
IRS sends coronavirus stimulus checks to dead people.


The number of deaths with COVID-19 proportionally coincides with the overall mortality rate in different age categories, which in itself transparently hints that COVID-19 is not an independent mortality factor among people with a positive coronavirus test. At the same time, it does not cause distortions in the usual picture of the distribution of mortality, and therefore acts according to previously known laws.

A healthy or conditionally healthy person will pass the infection easily or very easily, with rare exceptions. Serious complications, and even more so a fatal outcome, are usually caused by the presence of other chronic diseases or the complete absence of any treatment. Now let's look at the latest data on mortality in the European region.



The new peaks seemed to many a weighty counterargument to my previous article . But a person familiar with Hegel’s works will not see any contradictions between my work and the latest statistics from EuroMOMO. The number of deaths at a certain point has never been the basis for optimistic forecasts for me. Moreover, I myself expected an increase in mortality in Italy against the backdrop of the collapse of the local Ministry of Health and voiced potential problems in early April. And the data for the United States only confirms my hypotheses.

Observe carefully the dynamics of mortality curves in different countries. Well, the coronavirus cannot be so selective in its victims, mowing the Spaniards and sparing the Germans! Elementary logic tells us that the new peaks are largely, if not primarily, related to the state of national health care systems, and not to virulence, contagiousness, incubation period and others.

Did you know that in Spain in March nationalized all private clinics? Why in neighboring Portugal did the coronavirus hardly affect demographics? Have you heard that in Germany, hospital beds are equipped at stations like in Italy or in compartment cars like in France? How is medicine in Denmark so different from the NHS in the UK, except for hypertrophic measures to combat the pandemic?

Remembering models with frightening exhibitors from Thomas Pueyo and Neil Ferguson, do you think that the main thing is strict quarantine? According to those forecasts, in Sweden with Belarus, corpses should already be lying on the streets, but this does not happen and we clearly see that the peak of mortality among the Swedes has declined! Meanwhile, the completely irresponsible press continues to demonize the situation in both countries and forces them to follow a common scenario.
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Note that I have never mentioned the catastrophic situation in the economy. Damage will not be measured in money, but in lives! The consequence of the current methods of combating epidemic will be great human grief, drunkenness, banditry, falling birth rates and much more. Denmark is already talking about the fallacy of the measures taken, and Ms. Rakova urges SARS to be regarded as a suspicion of COVID-19. Wake up, you are the victim of a dangerous illusion of mortality in the coronavirus!

Apotheosis


If we draw medical analogies, then the negligent attitude of WHO to statistics provoked a cytokine storm on a scale of entire states. This irrational, monstrously exaggerated reaction is similar to a hyperimmune response that truly destroys an organism that has encountered a moderate-risk infection. This is a very sad story, and it is very sad that our country goes on about this psychosis.

Already twice before the publication of my articles, I had an unbearable feeling, similar to weakness from the fact that it seems to me that I know the truth, but cannot be heard. Now it does not seem to me, but deep feelings have been replaced by humility. Maybe stupidity is a big sin and we deserve what we have?

Thank you for your attention, Ilya Pestov, author of Groks.

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