Those annoying, smart people at Scientific American think “President Trump, a congressman and conspiracy fantasists” are, in technical terms, full of shit about the number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 being inflated:
A persistent falsehood has been circulating on social media: the number of COVID deaths is much lower than the official statistic of more than 218,000, and therefore the danger of the disease has been overblown. In August President Trump retweeted a post claiming that only 6 percent of these reported deaths were actually from COVID-19. (The tweet originated from a follower of the debunked conspiracy fantasy QAnon.) Twitter removed the post for containing false information, but fabrications such as these continue to spread. U.S. Representative Roger Marshall of Kansas complained in September that Facebook had removed a post in which he claimed that 94 percent of COVID-19 deaths reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “were the result of 2-3 additional serious illnesses and were of advanced age.”
Now some facts: Researchers know beyond a doubt that the number of COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. have surpassed 200,000. These numbers are supported by three lines of evidence, including death certificates. The inaccurate idea that only 6 percent of the deaths were really caused by the coronavirus is “a gross misinterpretation” of how death certificates work, says Robert Anderson, lead mortality statistician at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics.
The scope of the coronavirus’s deadly toll is clear, even if final numbers will not be known until the pandemic is over. “We’re pretty confident about the scale and order of magnitude of deaths, but we’re not clear on the exact number yet,” says Justin Lessler, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
“When we ask if COVID killed somebody, it means ‘Did they die sooner than they would have if they didn’t have the virus?’” says infectious disease epidemiologist Justin Lessler. Not “Did they have underlying conditions that made them more susceptible to dying from COVID?”
You can read more at the link if you are one of those smarty-pants liberals who prefers facts with their well-known liberal bias to All-American truthiness. Data shows COVID-19 is now the third leading cause of death in the U.S.
If anything, cases and death counts to date are understated.
When this mess took hold in March, my wife and I knew 3 people infected with all the now-classic COVID symptoms at a time there were only 40 official cases in this county of 260,000 residents (all survived). How is that possible? Because none fit the profile to be tested at a time testing was rationed. They were never tested or counted.
I was exposed to Legionnaires’ in September 2019. But I was already on antibiotics for a week-long “fever of unknown origin” several days before health authorities discovered the Legionnaires’ outbreak. On follow-up a week later, I was tested and came up negative. My mild case (likely Pontiac Fever) does not show up in those statistics either.
Update: Guess what?
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