Originally written September 25, 2021
I'll admit - hospitalization rates across the nation are increasing although in recent weeks they have appeared to peak and turn lower. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#new-hospital-admissions
But let's unpack this for a second because to understand what is really happening some critical questions are not being asked, or if they are, they aren't being answered. Notice that the title of the graph at the above link says "New Admission of Patients with Confirmed Covid-19." What it doesn't say is "New Admission of Patients Due to Covid-19." None of this is to make light of anyone's suffering or death, and I do believe that COVID-19 is real and can be potentially lethal to some people. But the truth matters especially with the policies the powers that be are trying to force on the public while not sharing all of the information so people can make truly informed decisions for themselves.
The admission policy today for most hospitals, surgical centers, etc. is to require a COVID test whether you have a scheduled appointment, or an unscheduled admission, i.e. an emergency event. So, if I fall off the ladder at my house and break my leg which requires a trip to the ER, they will test me for COVID upon admission. If I'm in a car wreck and am rushed to the hospital in an ambulance, I'm getting a COVID test. If I'm having a heart attack or stroke and am taken to the hospital, I'm getting a Covid test. If I'm pregnant (that would be weird, huh?) and have an emergency complication that requires a hospital admission, I'm getting a COVID test. If I overdosed on prescription medication and am admitted to the ER, I'm getting a COVID test.
Obviously in the very beginning of the pandemic, not everyone was tested upon admission, but with Uncle Sam throwing money out there for each COVID admission, you can bet it didn't take long to institute such a policy. Most hospitals also continue to test for COVID at intervals during a hospital stay. From the beginning, how many cases, hospitalizations, and deaths fall into the quite realistic scenarios I outlined above? So what, you say? Why does it matter?
It matters because none of these scenarios involved me going to the hospital because of COVID, but I will be lumped into the admissions and "cases" being breathlessly reported on by the government and media if I test positive. It's actually easier to get patients admitted if they test positive for COVID. Think it doesn't happen?
According to a leaked document from the National Health Service in the UK, 56% of their hospitalizations were due to ailments other than COVID and the patients tested positive after admission. Maybe it only happens in the UK.
Oh wait, according to an article in The Atlantic it happens here too!
Since the media, politicians, and bureaucrats are short on sharing real data, and like to use definitive and highly scientific terms such as "surging" to describe the this round of COVID infections, I figured I would actually look at the numbers to get a handle on the true impact of COVID, and what it means for those of us in the unwashed, dumbed down masses who do not possess the capacity to think for ourselves.
The CDC loves inconsistency in regard to age groups and data collection/reporting dates in their graphs making it a bit of a challenge to extrapolate and perform comparisons. But unfortunately, it's what we have to work with, so let's pretend that this is clean data collected and disseminated by people who actually know what they are doing. I guess if it's good enough for government work, it’s good enough for us. Any of the CSV files I downloaded from the CDC website will be linked if you want to look at some of the raw numbers yourself. I will also include links to the specific pages on the CDC website. I'm not using statistical analysis here and have been known to make errors, so it wouldn't be a bad idea for you to check my work.
CASES, HOSPITALIZATIONS, & DEATHS
As of this writing, there are 38,709,295 "cases" and 634,157 deaths per the header on the CDC's website. Unfortunately, on some of the dashboards where I could download data they only display 30,460,006 cases and 526,164 deaths. They also don't disclose time frames on some of their dashboards, but we know there is at least a year's worth of info.
As with Fauci and the CDC, let's make believe that our natural immune systems have totally failed us forever (or that they never existed without the grace of modern medicine), and that viruses don't mutate into less lethal variants over time. Believe it or not, viruses aren't trying to kill their hosts because when the host dies, they can no longer replicate, and they die. Assuming all of these cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are truly a result of COVID, here is what you might expect from this scourge of humanity year in and year out:
Relative risk is your chance of hospitalization or death if you get COVID. Absolute risk is your chance of hospitalization or death per the total US population for that particular age group because not everyone contracts COVID, and many who do contract COVID are mildly symptomatic or asymptomatic and don't get tested. While I am not using statistical methods to make these calculations, basic math paints the picture well enough.
Thanks to the CDC's inconsistency in age grouping, I can't break down the relative and absolute risk of hospitalizations for the age groups that have the questions marks so I had to go with 50+ but you probably get the idea that as you get older hospitalization rates increase. Based on these numbers, if you're 65 years or older, you have a greater risk of dying from COVID if you catch it. However, your absolute risk of dying from COVID in a given year is still under 1% for everyone except people in the 85+ range.
Just to be clear, this is not the same as the infection fatality rate (IFR). The IFR is a different calculation and is squishy because they don't know the true number of infections. We do know that infections are higher than reported cases which means my calculations are higher than the actual rates of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths.
Maybe I'm looking at this the wrong way but at 85+ years, your odds of making it to your next birthday tend to decrease substantially regardless of COVID. If I'm 85+ years old and only have a 2.5% chance of dying from something, I'll take those percentages any day. We're going to die of something at some point, why not COVID? Over 650,000 people die of cardiovascular disease in this country each year and we don't seem to be freaking out over that.
CASES SURGING IN KIDS
I saw on the national news the other day that cases are surging in kids. Unfortunately, a case has never really been defined except to be a positive PCR test which once again does not equate to an active infection. So, what do these surging cases mean in the real world? Here are the results in terms of hospitalizations for kids age 0-17 years.
The rate of hospitalization has surged 700% all the way from a low of .07/100,000 kids to a whopping .49/100,000 kids. That's right, .00049% of the population for that age group are being hospitalized with COVID, but not necessarily due to COVID. Not to make light of anyone going into the hospital for any reason, but I don't think we need to sound the sirens for the end of the world just yet.
THAT’S CO-MORBID
A big issue being downplayed or ignored altogether is the health status of people who are being hospitalized and dying with COVID. While it could be true that on occasion, a "perfectly healthy" person is struck down in their prime due to COVID, the data would suggest that it is the unhealthy who are being most impacted at least from a mortality perspective. Viruses are kind of like us humans. Why work harder than you need to when you can pick the low hanging fruit?
According to the CDC, in 90% of the COVID deaths recorded, COVID was listed as the underlying cause with the remainder listing COVID as a contributing cause, but in only 5% of the deaths was COVID the only cause. In fact, for those 95% who had conditions or causes in addition to COVID there were an additional 4.0 conditions or causes per death. The CDC had lumped a bunch of individual categories together and I also averaged the number of co-morbidities across all of the fatalities for each age group instead of trying to eliminate people with no co-morbidities, so my averages are a little under 3. But here is a quick snapshot:
So, you're telling me that even though these are people with heart disease, cancer, Type II diabetes, liver disease, obesity, respiratory issues, drug overdoses, etc, that it was definitely COVID that did them in 90% of the time?
Santa Clara County and Alameda County in California (of all places) did a review of their COVID deaths and reduced their death tolls by 22% and almost 25% respectively. It's essentially policy in this country to over report deaths as a COVID death, and there has been no distinction made in the reported deaths as those having died due to COVID vs died with COVID which is a huge difference! Now, I understand that's just two counties, but how many other jurisdictions incorrectly attributed deaths to COVID, and how many people actually died due to COVID vs died with COVID?
What's truly sad about this is that we have a golden opportunity to address the elephant in the room which is the poor state of health for probably the majority of the people in this country. I'm sure this will piss a lot of people off, but many of these chronic conditions, including many cancers, are simply a result of lifestyle factors, and have little to do with genetics or a lack of medical care. In fact, I would argue that we have too much of the wrong type of medical care which I call sick care that only treats symptoms. We're so disconnected from what it means to be truly healthy that we wouldn't know good health if it punched us in the face.
If it weren't so sad, I would have to laugh every time I hear someone say they're healthy and then rattle off the list of medications they take on a daily basis. Different subject for a different day, but addressing the chronic health issues we face as a country would dramatically enhance our overall ability to deal with COVID and any other pathogens coming down the pipe without resorting to medical tyranny that will do little if anything to improve our lives.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#demographics
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#new-hospital-admissions
https://1drv.ms/x/s!Atb_aFvyX5OZj0yTt0dZwcm8koi1?e=kwTogN