All tagged CDC

The Ugly Uncertainty About Covid-19 Deaths

The Ugly Uncertainty About Covid-19 Deaths

Tatiana Prophet
Covid-19

By TATIANA PROPHET

COVID UNCERTAINTY NO. 1: Overall U.S. deaths have risen; but non-Covid deaths appear to be sharply dropping compared with 2019 (year-to-date).

Every year, CDC death records include top causes of death -- and then any remaining causes as a bulk number.

*Preliminary data shows that total deaths YTD for 2020 went up by 153,388 from YTD 2019. But the total "selected" (top-15 plus Covid) deaths use overlapping categories, and they went up by 278,496 (see bar graph).

*We would expect the remaining deaths to stay flat or grow if Covid-19 were causing excess deaths. But instead, non-Covid deaths appear to be headed for a steep drop in 2020 compared with previous years (see lowest bar for 2020). In fact, the “selected” deaths suddenly make up 80 percent of all deaths instead of 70 percent for all previous years since 2014, and did not go up in proportion with the remaining deaths as a portion of the whole.

COVID-19 TIMELINE: PREDICTION AND DIAGNOSIS

COVID-19 TIMELINE: PREDICTION AND DIAGNOSIS

Tatiana Prophet
Health Care

By TATIANA PROPHET

A healthy society should not only have one voice. - Dr. Li Wenliang, reluctant whistleblower, who died of Covid-19 in Wuhan, China, after warning his fellow doctors to be alert in their facilities, on a private chat system. Someone leaked his comments and he was reprimanded publicly by police.

NOVEMBER 9, 2015 RALPH BARIC, AN INFECTIOUS-DISEASE RESEARCHER AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL, published a study on his team’s efforts to engineer a chimeric virus with the surface protein of the SHC014 coronavirus, found in horseshoe bats in China, and the backbone of one that causes human-like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in mice. The hybrid virus could infect human airway cells and caused disease in mice, according to the team’s results, which were published in Nature Medicine. The team included four scientists from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, one from the Key Laboratory of Special Pathogens in Wuhan, China, one from Zurich and two from Harvard.