Coronavirus Mortality Study Continues to Confirm Overall Mortality Not Much Different Than a Bad Seasonal Flu
By Joe Hoft
On March 17, 2020, we were the first to identify that the WHO and the WHO’s Director General Tedros were pushing fraudulent numbers regarding the expected mortality of the coronavirus. They way overstated the expected rate of death.
We then followed up with multiple posts on the subject. Next we reported on June 7, 2020, a study showed that when looking at the mortality rates for all causes this flu season, things aren’t much worse than a bad flu.
More current data today supports this observation.
Dr. Richard Cross, PhD, provided us the following information related to the China coronavirus. We have been given his permission to share sections of his report:
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When it comes to the COVID-19 event, we have been experiencing a serious case of tunnel vision. As we focus on the day to day increase of COVID-19 things could look pretty grim, but as we take a step back and look at the comparative total mortality here in the US, things aren’t much worse than a bad seasonal flu, like that last seen in 2017-18. If you take the New York City region out of the mix, the rest of the country is cumulatively well within the expected mortality.
The estimated death toll from COVID-19 is on track to exceed 120,000 US deaths in the next few weeks. Yet, the majority of COVID-19 related deaths have been concentrated in the New York/New England region which to date includes nearly 50 percent of all COVID-19 deaths nationwide; the hospitals in this region were strained but not overwhelmed in the middle of April. The coronavirus’ effect on New York City has been especially telling if you examine the departure from expected cumulative mortality trends over the last four years in the CDC fluseason cycle.
We avoid looking at the COVID-19 counts, and rather focus on total mortality (by all causes) since this perspective avoids the diagnostic uncertainty of determining the exact cause of death, and does not rely on sampling problems associated with COVID-19 testing or potentially inflated death estimates from the virus.
This study is brilliant because it takes out the CDC’s confusing directive that stated that all deaths should be counted as coronavirus deaths, even if the cause may have been another condition. By counting all deaths, no matter the cause, we can clearly see the impact of the coronavirus on the nation and based on these results we see that the coronavirus was ‘not much worse than a bad seasonal flu’.
The study goes on to report on the New York situation:
The NYC/NJ contributions to total mortality have been so high that if they are removed from the current total mortality and replaced with levels proportional to those found in the rest of the US, the current total US death toll would be equivalent to the death toll from the 2018 seasonal flu. Even including the NYC/NJ mortality, throughout the entire US, the CDC seasonal cumulative total mortality (death by all causes) for the week 30 of the 2019-2020 flu season is 1,750,703, contrasted with the nearest ‘moderately bad’ CDC flu season of 2017-18 which came in at 1,711,357 total deaths at the same point (week 30) two years earlier. This constitutes a 39k mortality increase, most of which can be accounted for by the New York City area. If the annual mortality inflation of 2 percent per annum is taken into account, total mortality for the current flu season will be marginally beyond the normal expected increase, but well within increases that have been seen in previous flu seasons.
Apart from the New England region, there appear no evident effects/deviations from the main expected increase line for states that locked down early and with more stringent requirements, compared to those who had few lockdown restrictions (e.g., AR, IA, NB, SD, ND, WY.) States who opened sooner, (e.g., FL, TX, and GA) are all similarly situated somewhat beneath the prediction line. By this metric, there is little obvious difference across the entire country except for the Northeast.
The relative impact on total mortality of the COVID-19 event in the New York City region was in a class by itself… NYC is so far outside the mortality space of the other regions that it inhabited a different mortality universe altogether. It is well known that New Jersey experienced a high level of excess mortality, by a factor of 8 times its own expected increase, but yet it was still far below NYC, which is over 6 times greater than anywhere in the country.