A few of my friends have been throwing around that the CDC “quietly” updated its statistics in the middle of the night, without telling anyone, to say that only 6% of COVID deaths were real. “All the other reported deaths were caused by PRE-EXISTING CONDITIONS.” I’m sure the CDC was dressed in black surrounded by the Illuminati while doing it. “They” don’t want us to know, so they removed President Trump’s tweet about it.
First of all, that’s not what the updated report says at all (and that’s why the tweet was removed). Secondly, it’s “in the middle of the night” with no press coverage because it’s not news at all. Let’s take a look. Everyone is referring to this passage on this page.
This passage is talking about the CDC comorbidity data. Comorbidities are common in pretty much every disease. It basically means medical conditions that are found together (maybe by coincidence, maybe not). Sometimes they can make things worse. Diabetes and heart disease make many infections worse. That’s pretty common. Here’s what a death certificate usually looks like.
This really is not news. This is how deaths have always been recorded, and how deaths should be recorded. When you die in a hospital, as opposed to at home, it’s unusual for your death certificate to say just one thing. Let’s say you have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and get admitted for the flu. Your flu turns into pneumonia and sepsis, and you end up dying from cardiac arrest. Everyone would concede that COPD was a contributing factor. Sepsis and cardiac arrest killed you. Would you have been alive today if you didn’t have COPD? Maybe so. The underlying condition is a pretty important factor in this case. We don’t want to leave it off. We also don’t want to write that you just died from “COPD.” That would be misleading. The COPD made you more prone to getting a serious infection in your lungs, but you probably would have been fine if you never had the flu. We usually say those people died from influenza pneumonia or sepsis complicated by COPD.
The same goes for HIV. HIV has never killed anyone if we go by the rules of the SocialMediaDocs. HIV doesn’t directly do damage to you. HIV just makes you a lot easier to kill. All of these opportunistic infections just can’t wait to kick you while you’re down. Do you die of HIV or cryptococcal pneumonia? It’s literally both. That cryptococcus (a fungus) could only infect you because you had HIV, but HIV wouldn’t have killed you if cryptococcus hadn’t paid a visit (it’s like a really depressing “Which came first?”). Both of them are really important factors.
And even then. . .
A lot of the “hot takes” I’ve been seeing on this are saying it shows that “healthy people are safe.” They don’t really understand what “underlying conditions” have been reported on death certificates. They think most of what the CDC is reporting are things like diabetes, COPD, hypertension, etc. I think it’s pretty horrible that people are willing to throw all of those people under the bus. However, that’s not what the CDC data is saying at all. The CDC lists the “underlying” conditions pretty plainly.
Let’s look at the top 10 things other than COVID that were listed on the death certificates:
- Influenza and pneumonia
- Respiratory failure
- Hypertensive disease
- Diabetes
- Vascular and unspecified dementia
- Cardiac Arrest
- Heart failure
- Renal failure
- Intentional and unintentional injury, poisoning and other adverse events
- Other medical conditions
I’ve bolded a few that COVID or treatment for COVID actually can cause (pneumonia and respiratory issues were the number 1 comorbid conditions). I could have probably bolded vascular and unspecified dementia too. There has some been association with COVID induced hypercoagulability and that, but since the connection is a bit tenuous, I didn’t.
When someone is admitted to the hospital for COVID, we usually admit them for “COVID Pneumonia” or respiratory distress. It’s amazing to me that 6% of people died without pneumonia on their death certificate. They usually ultimately die from “cardiac arrest” or “respiratory failure.” These are the outcomes that COVID causes, not underlying conditions (the CDC calls them comorbidities). It’s not “shocking.” The Illuminati can go home. Sorry guys.
I did look up “Intentional and unintentional injury, poisoning and other adverse events” because that one seemed weird. There isn’t a whole lot of data from the CDC, but it’s probably people who were admitted for something like an accident or illness and ended either being positive upon admission or contracting COVID while in the hospital and then progressed to COVID pneumonia. It’s not George who got hit by a truck and somehow gets COVID on his death certificate.
I’m not saying there aren’t some rogue data. I’m sure a George somewhere is reported as having died from COVID (I’ve been shown this article about a million times now). I’m just saying, this is not news. This is nothing to change our behavior. This doesn’t change the severity of COVID at all, even for healthy people.
I’m glad the Facebook-certified infectious disease specialists don’t keep as close an eye on flu data. Flu burden is a wild estimate compared to this. Our data here is pretty solid.