Against the Corona Panic, Part X: The problem of “deaths with vs. “deaths from”: Only one-third of corona-positive deaths as genuine “deaths from” in Sweden

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For earlier entries “Against the Corona Panic,” see:
Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven,
Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve

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One of the central problems with the media’s Corona reporting, with its beloved “rolling death counts” is the “Deaths With” vs. “Deaths From” Problem. How many of the reported deaths are truly “deaths from the virus” and how many are “deaths with the virus” of people who were dying anyway or clearly died of some other cause?

This is well-known to (many of) us on the anti-Panic side, but I think we have made little progress in raising awareness of it. So it goes, when the other side controls the media and is running a martial law regime with heavy use of saturation-level propaganda and suppression of dissent.

Getting straight answers on this has been difficult, especially since the extreme escalations of March (the unnecessary shutdowns, the disastrous Lockdowns). Following the coup d’etat, the Fauci junta in the US and similar Corona juntas in other countries do not seem to want to elucidate this matter. We are somewhat on our own, aided by quite a few honest experts and specialists, though, as often as not the experts too are subject to suppression (as in the case of the late-April deletion of the Dr. Erickson COVID briefing video by Youtube for unspecified “violating community policies” after their anti-Panic briefing got five million views in five days; Dr. Wittkowski’s video was also suppressed).

There are people doing great work on this, including experts and specialists who lack any kind of bullhorn and are used to scribbling away in obscurity (one of these experts, Knut Wittkowski, was profiled and his anti-Panic writings/expertise were featured here as Part V). Among the best and most comprehensive sources is Swiss Propaganda Research, which two days ago has come out with another comprehensive update; see some relevant excerpts below, in this post.

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Sweden: Has a proxy for Deaths With vs. Deaths From been hiding in plain sight?

We know “deaths with vs. deaths from” is a problem, but its magnitude is always at least uncertain. I dealt with this in Part IV on New York City. The whole thing gets confusing enough that the media, and the pro-Panic side generally, can just ignore it and up the intensity of Corona-prolefeed in circulation on the news and social media. Confusion, muddied-waters, and fear are the pro-Panic side’s bread-and-butter.

I’ve been closely following the numbers out of Sweden (See Part VII) for a few weeks and I think I can now say this:

The number in Sweden may be around two-thirds as “deaths with,” one-third as “deaths from.” If this is true, the pro-Panic projections by Ferguson and others are comfortably off by more than 100x.

In other words, if the epidemic in Sweden ends with 4,500 reported deaths, 1,500 may be true virus deaths and 3,000 may be those positive for the virus, and dead, but for whom the virus played either no role at all, or a highly ambiguous role at most, in their deaths.

This is not a novel observation for the anti-Panic side but one that deserves to be marked out clearly; it has important implications, not just for defeating the pro-Panic side on the facts, but for analyzing how the Panic began in the first place, which I return to at the end of this post.

Long recognizing this problem, and frustrated by the media’s refusal to mention it, the anti-Panic side has come up with memes like the one at the top of this post and this one:

“CNN Live: Man shot 33 times in the head dies from COVID-19″ (parody)

On Sweden. A key insight has long been in plain sight. I showed the graph to a friend and he immediately made a simple observation:

Deaths significantly exceed ICU Intakes.

Look at the area beneath the two curves in the latest graph. At a glance, the Deaths (blue) curve for Stay-Open Sweden covers much more ground than the ICU-Intake (orange) curve. There are about twice as many deaths as ICU intakes.

This is not because of a lack of space in the ICUs, as Sweden has never exceeded 70% capacity at any point this year.

The other relevant observation from the graph is that ICU Intakes peak before Deaths, which would be expected. The thing about this “Deaths far outnumber ICU intakes” point, though, is it is not expected.

I haven’t seen anyone else point this out, or ask what it means.

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The implications of the “twice as many deaths as ICU Intakes” may be highly significant not just for Sweden but for others, if the general pattern holds elsehwere.

The two relevant facts:

(1) The ‘Deaths’ curve for Sweden is all coronavirus-positive deaths, including those who die of something else but who are known to be positive at death.

(2) We know that the virus does not cause instant death, but brings about an onset of flu symptoms for which people would seek medical care. The most serious cases would be given the most serious treatment, which is intensive care (ICU).

Combining (1) and (2), it’s reasonable to assume that the typical case of a true, virus-caused deaths will be someone who first goes through the medical system, with the worst cases ending up in ICUs, and that the number of Corona Deaths who never get any treatment at all is minimal in Sweden. This means the figure “Total ICU intakes” could be a reasonable upper-bound for our sought-after “Deaths From.”

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Calculating a “Deaths With, Deaths From” estimate from Observed Data for Sweden

As of May 8, there are:

• 1,672 cumulative ICU-Intakes for COVID19 in Sweden, and
• 3,175 coronavirus-positive deaths.

(3,175 is equal to about one-quarter of expected deaths for the same period. This is, coincidentally, about the rate the virus has spread in the population by mid-April, according to the randomized studies.)

We also know that the number of current coronavirus-positive current ICU patients has fallen below 500 as of May 8, with the remaining circa 1,185 being resolved cases: Deaths and recoveries.

If the recovery rate once entering an ICU is somewhere between 40% and 60%, as it reportedly is elsewhere, it means that 475 to to 725 ICU patients who entered an ICU for a respiratory disease and were corona-positive have died. This is only 15% to 23% of the 3,175 corona-positive deaths. The remaining ca. 2,225 never entered an ICU and died in other circumstances.

This leaves us with 20% of corona-deaths as absolutely-definite “Deaths From,” against 80% being either “Deaths With” or ambiguous.

Of the ambiguous category, how many might realistically be “Deaths From”? Given that half died at nursing homes, places with short life-expectancies anyway, it’s possible that a fifth of the remainder (80%) are true Deaths From, three-fifths are “Deaths With,” and one-fifth are a coin toss, cause of death at examining doctor’s discretion. This gives us:

• 20% of deaths being those taken into an ICU who died there,
• 15% being genuine-virus-caused deaths outside ICUs,
• 50% are “Deaths With” who definitely died of other causes, and
• 15% Coin Tosses, those with severe health conditions whose cause of death is arguable, but in any case have lower life-expectancies than the usual person of their age.

The result of this exercise. We are left with 35% likely “Deaths From, those who would have had some appreciable number of years of meaningfully healthy life left. The sum can push higher, to 40% or slightly more, depending on how generous you are with classifying other deaths.

This “up to two-thirds deaths with the virus, not from it” estaimte happens to also be the same as the reported in early April (Fraser Nelson, “Coronavirus: To Swedes, it’s the rest of the world engaging in a reckless experiment,” Telegraph [UK], April 3):

[…] [U]pdating [Sweden’s] statistics to say if someone died from Covid, or of something else – but with Covid […] might reduce the “death” figure by two thirds. [Emphasis added]

Also in April, the head of Hamburg’s corona response emerged as an anti-Panic figure and ordered a review of causes of death, announcing he would only report “true” coronavirus-caused deaths, which reportedly reduced the total by half immediately. His desired reporting procedure was not in line with the Robert Koch Institute, which counts all coronavirus-positive deaths.

As for Sweden, the current trendline suggests that by the time the virus fades from the scene in Sweden, there will be 5,000 corona-positive deaths over a three-plus month period, mid-March to June. If this finding that “up to 40% are genuine deaths from the virus who wouldn’t have died anyway” holds, we are left with circa 2,000 genuine coronavirus-attributable deaths in Sweden. If excess deaths are about this level, and the rest of the year is normal, this flu epidemic will not push Sweden above its 2018 full-year mortality.

(This point is expanded on in Part XI.)

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Swiss Propaganda Research updates relevant to Deaths With vs. Deaths From

The “counting people as Covid victims who would have died anyway” problem overlaps with the “nursing home deaths” and “Panic-induced deaths” problems. The point being that it is unclear what many are dying of. It is for certain that (the direct effects of) the virus are only partly to blame for these deaths, and in some cases direct-virus-deaths are a very clear minority.

See these reports from Swiss Propaganda Research:

[U]p to 50% of current British excess mortality might not be caused by the coronavirus, but by the effects of the lockdown and general panic. This amounts to up to 3000 deaths per week. In fact, this figure could be even higher, as the British Covid19 definition… includes deaths with (rather than from) coronavirus as well as „suspected cases“.

[…]

The director of the Illinois Department of Health confirmed that even terminally ill people who clearly die of another cause but who test positive for Covid19 virus before or after death are recorded as Covid19 deaths.

[…]

The conservative Project Veritas whistleblower platform spoke with New York funeral home directors who stated that currently Covid is written „on all death certificates“ (of suspected cases), whether there was a test or not. […] The Covid19 statistics are inflated for political or financial reasons, the directors stated.

[…]

In most Western countries, 30% to 70% of all deaths „related to Covid“ occurred in nursing homes (in some regions even up to 90%). It is also known [that the crisis in] northern Italy […] began with a panic-induced collapse of nursing care for the elderly.

Nursing homes require targeted protection and do not benefit from a general lockdown of society. If one looks only at the deaths in the general population, in most countries these are in the range of a normal or even mild wave of influenza.

Moreover, in many cases it is not clear what people in nursing homes really died of, i.e. whether it was Covid19 or stress, fear and loneliness. From Belgium, for example, it is known that about 94% of all deaths in nursing homes are untested „presumed cases“.

A new analysis of French statistics moreover shows the following: as soon as there is a „suspected case“ in a nursing home (e.g. due to coughing), all deaths are considered „suspected Covid19 deaths“, and as soon as there is a „confirmed case“ in a nursing home (even if symptomless), all deaths are considered „confirmed Covid19 deaths“.

A report from Germany vividly describes the extreme conditions under which hundreds of thousands of patients in care and nursing homes have had to live in recent weeks, often against their will. Many of the patients were barely allowed to leave their rooms, were no longer allowed to go out into the fresh air or receive visits from their relatives.

In several nursing homes, the error-prone PCR virus test moreover led to serious false alarms and panic. In one Canadian nursing home, employees fled in fear of the corona virus, resulting in the tragic death of 31 patients due to lack of care.

The former New York Times journalist and Corona critic Alex Berenson writes on Twitter: „Let’s be clear: the fact the nursing home deaths are not front and center every day in elite media coverage of COVID tells you everything you need to know about the media’s priority – which is instilling panic (and punishing Trump), not driving good health policy.“

(That the goal of the “elite media” is to “instill panic” is accurate. The reasons can be debated [as in this comment-thread in which JR Ewing argues for a reason the media may be pushing Corona], As these reports make clear, the pro-Panic side and their leaders in the media and elsewhere may already responsible or more deaths than the minor flu-strain out of Wuhan, before the effects of the recession really start to bite.)

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As I realized and attempted to show in Part IV (on New York City), there are really three types of deaths relevant here:

• (1.) genuine, direct, coronavirus-attributable deaths (deaths from the flu, not something else);
• (2.) people who would have died anyway and happened to be corona-positive at death;
• (3.) Panic-induced deaths, who may or may not be corona-positive but for whom the virus played no, or a highly ambiguous role in death. The most unambiguous, unarguable of these are the thousands of outright corona-negative excess deaths reported in the Panic hotspots like NYC and London, due to untreated heart attacks and similar problems, with victims too scared to visit a hospital due to the media’s pro-Panic drumbeat). Some of the nursing home victims may also qualify, people at the end of their lives giving up as a stressful situation saps their remaining will to life, or in some cases their care staff flees in panic.

These are conceptual categories and in practice it may be unclear how to sort a specific case. But, in general terms, it is now clear that if we want (1.) only, the true number plummets by a considerable amount below the reported number, a drop of up to two-thirds, and potentially more in some cases.

The image that opens this post is an extreme example of (2.). Here it is again:

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Just how wrong were the models? Revisiting Neil Ferguson’s evil deed

I believe the Corona-Panic can be defeated easily by this point, if emotion were removed from it, by graphs like this:

In light of the “deaths with vs. deaths from” problem, the true magnitude of the “projections vs. reality gap” is even starker.

Downward pressure on the Actual Deaths curve: Removing “deaths with“

The blue curve is all coronavirus-positive deaths whereas the orange (Do Nothing projection) and gray (Swedish-style response projection) curves are only for direct, virus-caused deaths. They are not measuring the same thing.

In practice, the blue curve should be pushed down a ways, deflated by the degree to which the reported number includes “deaths with.” If it is true that two-thirds of these are natural deaths are not attributable to the virus, the blue curve should be one-third as high as it is.

Upward pressure on the Prediction curves: Those phantom “swamped hospitals”

Additionally, Ferguson and co.’s fantasy “swamped hospitals” scenario under a Swedish-style response would have potentially added 50% to, or doubled, both projection curves.

When all is said and done, then, the Ferguson horror scenario may have been off by 100x, and plausibly even more.

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Implications; Questions

The implication, if it is correct that only something like one-third of reported deaths are genuinely attributable to the virus’ direct effects, is this:

The idea that there is a uniquely terrible flu pandemic going on is largely an illusion stemming from the very act of hyper-tracking it (hyper-tracking a particular virus and intensely focusing on it), misinterpreting what we are hyper-tracking, then having people scare each other with these misinterpreted/hyper-tracked figures built on a foundation of fluff. Result: A hysteria escalation spiral, with nothing really gained by it, and with very, very much lost.

Why did ‘we’ hyper-track it, leading perhaps inevitably to these kinds of mismeaures?

Were the misinterpretations of ‘our’ hyper-tracking (of some flu-virus) innocently done? Was it a big misunderstanding? How much of it was malicious?

Being that the Panic has created its own inertia, these questions may be somewhat academic, but it’s still worth asking. It’s worth seeking to understand how something like this could happen to rational (we hope) people.

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