Article on Covid deaths in U.S.

[Vince44]

Total Bull Shit! -

 

[Toucan]

I must confess, the civility demonstrated in many of the responses in this thread is quite refreshing (minus the previous above mine).

 

[sy barite]

Apologies to my namesake Sy barite. My post above was not in reaction to you at all, but was just a comment only to add to the conversation in supporting some of the really good points usefulidiot made. I've always enjoyed reading your posts Sy Barite and have appreciated your open mindedness, and I'm sorry if I implied to the contrary.

One of the excellent points usefulidiot makes is that none of us can be experts in everything, and thus we have to make decisions about which experts to trust...

For myself, one thing I try to look for in vetting information online is some agreement across a spectrum of media outlets, and when the outlet is one that is lesser known and new to me I must admit that's can be a red flag for myself, and so I like to learn a little bit more about the source first before I read the article itself.

At the time when you originally made your post I did some reading about the American Institute for Economic Research and then got tied up with something else before I had a chance to read the entire article itself, but I must admit what I initially read about the source did alarm me, for example:

"It is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit[5] that partners with the Atlas Network and other Koch-funded think tanks.[6][7]"

"Twitter has removed a tweet from White House coronavirus adviser Dr. Scott Atlas that claimed masks don't work to stop the spread of COVID-19. "Masks work? NO," Atlas had tweeted Saturday, followed by misrepresentations of the science behind the effectiveness of masks in battling the coronavirus pandemic. Atlas also shared a link to an article in The American Institute for Economic Research that argues against the effectiveness of masks."

I previously had already done a lot of reading about the idea that Covid deaths are more likely properly attributable to the co-morbidities that are concomitant with Covid rather than Covid itself, and unfortunately like so much scientific information these days this view has become politicized.

But ultimately I do believe it's currently a minority scientific opinion from the other reading that I've done. I did read your article in full and it's very interesting and compelling. A lot of great points I totally agree with... for example:

Lockdowns have resulted in severe damage to our capacity to improve the general health of society. From the catastrophic economic damage that lowers the standard of living for everyone to surgeries being deemed “unessential,” our current policies are not helping in preventing deaths in general; they are likely leading to more. Suicides and substance abuse are up, mental and physical health are down, all due to lockdowns.

But I have to say I am not persuaded by what I think the main point of the article is: that most Covid deaths that are classified as such are not actually deaths due to Covid. Again I personally believe that to be the minority scientific opinion, and I note the writer is not a medical expert: Ethan Yang, so to some degree this seemed to be speculation based on certain statistics rather than a medical argument.

All that said it's certainly possible I'll change my mind if I continue to read about it from a variety of other sources. And Sy Barite I definitely did not mean to imply you were challenging science! I appreciate and respect that you noted the article conflicts with other studies and is not peer reviewed... I would be interested to see the verdict of the peer reviews once they're completed.

In the article discussing the retraction of the original piece from Johns Hopkins Newsletter, they actually do get into some specific detail about why they disagree: e.g.

it was brought to our attention that our coverage of Genevieve Briand’s presentation “COVID-19 Deaths: A Look at U.S. Data” has been used to support dangerous inaccuracies that minimize the impact of the pandemic. We decided on Nov. 26 to retract this article to stop the spread of misinformation, as we noted on social media...
As assistant director for the Master’s in Applied Economics program at Hopkins, Briand is neither a medical professional nor a disease researcher. At her talk, she herself stated that more research and data are needed to understand the effects of COVID-19 in the U.S. Briand was quoted in the article as saying, “All of this points to no evidence that COVID-19 created any excess deaths. Total death numbers are not above normal death numbers.” This claim is incorrect and does not take into account the spike in raw death count from all causes compared to previous years. According to the CDC, there have been almost 300,000 excess deaths due to COVID-19.

And more... that's all here: A closer look at U.S. deaths due to COVID-19

They also note the article has not been completely removed - it is still accessible:

However, it is our responsibility as journalists to provide a historical record. We have chosen to take down the article from our website, but it is available here as a PDF.

Ah. Thank you. I should have known a guy who chose such a great name couldn't be that far off from my own opinion.

I agree with all of your points. Perhaps I should have expressed my own doubts about the story more strongly, but what I was really focused on was the initial reaction to limit its exposure. I really detest the whole de-platforming and censoring phenomenon that we're in the grip of and I may have focused on that too much.

As for the story itself, I remain open to both sides of the argument. The point made by Briand that most made me sit up was her contention that there is a correlation between the number of covid deaths and the lower number of deaths attributed to other causes that mostly account for death in the most affected age groups. If she's right, I'd be interested in reading the explanation for that. As I said in my first post, it raises some other points I've been wondering about myself.

Here in Canada, the number of deaths naturally increases as somewhere between .7% to 1% of the population dies (our death rate is somewhere around 7.9 per 1000). There are other factors affecting that number, but population increase is the main one. Looking at previous years, we could have expected around 295k folks to pass onto the merry beyond this year. It looks like we're fixing to attribute approximately 12k deaths to Coronavirus in Canada in 2020. I'm not drawing any conclusions, but I am saying those are interesting numbers to keep an eye on.

 

[sy barite]

I must confess, the civility demonstrated in many of the responses in this thread is quite refreshing (minus the previous above mine).

And it's greatly appreciated!

 

[mar91]

Many people 100% buy into science when it comes to using their computers, cell phones, driving in cars, flying in planes, getting operated on by surgeons, etc. and yet they are completely skeptical of climate scientists, epidemiologists, evolutionary biologists, etc. etc. They are at once both utterly dependent on science but still selectively scornful of science when it doesn't suit their purpose.

One thing about this though is not all scientists, epidemiologists, biologists, etc. agree either. So if you choose to agree with one scientist over a different scientist are you denying the science. One group presents one argument and the other group presents a counter argument. The climate is an interesting one as I believe most agree that the climate is changing, I think where there is disagreement is to the biggest cause and the speed of the change. You have radical claims on both sides of the scale and the truth probably lies somewhere in between.

 

[Sybarite]

One thing about this though is not all scientists, epidemiologists, biologists, etc. agree either. So if you choose to agree with one scientist over a different scientist are you denying the science. One group presents one argument and the other group presents a counter argument. The climate is an interesting one as I believe most agree that the climate is changing, I think where there is disagreement is to the biggest cause and the speed of the change. You have radical claims on both sides of the scale and the truth probably lies somewhere in between.

That can be true when where there is genuine disagreement or uncertainty in the larger scientific world, but that's often not really the case, so it's important to investigate what the scientific consensus is when it exists.

There is a difference between emerging science and settled science. Claims going against settled science are radical claims, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

Sure it used to be that you could find some lone scientist trying to pretend he is a modern day Galileo saying something like "smoking doesn't cause lung cancer", but in many cases it's actually because he's bought and paid for by some entity whose interest depends on what is a radically contrarian view. As they say "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

Similarly today there is near total consensus amongst climate scientists on climate, biologists on evolution, epidemiologists on vaccines, etc. I'm not talking about the smaller details of science but the bigger picture questions e.g. is global warming actually happening?, is evolution real?, are vaccines effective?, etc.

People need to be transparent about whether the scientists they choose to advance their arguments have any professional constituency or whether their viewpoint is generally considered to be nuts by the greater scientific community.

"Project Steve" is a good example of scientific consensus and settled science: Project Steve - Wikipedia

 

[sy barite]

That can be true when where there is genuine disagreement or uncertainty in the larger scientific world, but that's often not really the case, so it's important to investigate what the scientific consensus is when it exists.

There is a difference between emerging science and settled science. Claims going against settled science are radical claims, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

Sure it used to be that you could find some lone scientist trying to pretend he is a modern day Galileo saying something like "smoking doesn't cause lung cancer", but in many cases it's actually because he's bought and paid for by some entity whose interest depends on what is a radically contrarian view. As they say "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

Similarly today there is near total consensus amongst climate scientists on climate, biologists on evolution, epidemiologists on vaccines, etc. I'm not talking about the smaller details of science but the bigger picture questions e.g. is global warming actually happening?, is evolution real?, are vaccines effective?, etc.

People need to be transparent about whether the scientists they choose to advance their arguments have any professional constituency or whether their viewpoint is generally considered to be nuts by the greater scientific community.

"Project Steve" is a good example of scientific consensus and settled science: Project Steve - Wikipedia

All true, but I think we agree not at all applicable to the article that was the reason for this post. John Ioannidis is reputed to be one of the world's leading epidemiologists and he's against lockdowns and has questioned what is accepted in the mainstream as very basic assumptions about covid. I don't wish to speak for Mar91, but there seem to be a lot of questions about the science that are no where near settled and if that's true, then the censorious bent of mind that current rules our media is not good.

 

[henricas]

Best is Henricas, who claims to have seen an article released on November 22, "months ago" Dilutional indeed.

I like the fact that you quote me but do not reply to my answer so that I can't point out how wrong you are about your statement

The article you quote was indeed publish by the American Institute for Research on NOV 26 and it was based on a TWEET published by the Johns Hopkins Newsletter on Nov 22. In turn the Johns Hopkins Newsletter, was quoting a tweet from the Science & Technology section; tweet that was pulled because the data was interpreted wrong.

The science and technology tweet based it's statement on an article published in “docdroid ”. DocDroid is a document sharing platform. It automatically converts your uploaded files and provides a convenient view of the documents and presentations. This data can be publish by anyone, in fact DocDroid publishes this caveat in their home page "DocDroid is a document sharing platform, similar to Google Docs or Dropbox. Unfortunately, sometimes our service is abused by spammers.

A lot of the articles and tweets referenced in the JHN string of data, have been deleted and/or removed due to the misinformation they had, but if you have the patience and knowhow you can still follow the breadcrumbs

I read this article (the base of this string of data) back in the first week of October in "The Plant Strong Club" a site of dubious nature as they have no mission a statement and no "who are we section". The article was using data ending in September 26th, and was interpreting the data at its own will. The page where it was, points to a video in Jason Shurka site, a video full of misinformation and lies. The video has been pulled from YouTube but still can be seen in the Shurka site. Jason Shurka is a self proclaimed Author, Entrepreneur & Investor that peddles new age cures and books.

So you see my friend, is not just pointing to one article and saying this is the truth; If you are going to back something, you should spend the time and make the effort to verify the validity of the information you are backing up.

 

[sy barite]

So I'll just go ahead and call b.s. on most of both your posts on this thread.

You said you read "this article" months ago. Clearly bullshit. You said Trump referred to it during his campaign. Again, bullshit. Now you come back hoping to misdirect from your lies by "demonstrating" your familiarity with file sharing platforms. Slow clap.

We agreed hospitals aren't profiting from covid. Where hospitals are expanding into parking lots that's more an indication of wanting to separate cases, not a capacity problem. In fact there's hardly been any capacity problem in the hospitals in North America.

Again, my point is that I don't believe it was wise to remove or limit access to the article from the JH website without at least citing specifically what was wrong in it. That kind of censorship doesn't lead to helpful conversation, just to more conspiracy theories.

 

[henricas]

So I'll just go ahead and call b.s. on most of both your posts on this thread.

You said you read "this article" months ago. Clearly bullshit. You said Trump referred to it during his campaign. Again, bullshit. Now you come back hoping to misdirect from your lies by "demonstrating" your familiarity with file sharing platforms. Slow clap.

We agreed hospitals aren't profiting from covid. Where hospitals are expanding into parking lots that's more an indication of wanting to separate cases, not a capacity problem. In fact there's hardly been any capacity problem in the hospitals in North America.

Again, my point is that I don't believe it was wise to remove or limit access to the article from the JH website without at least citing specifically what was wrong in it. That kind of censorship doesn't lead to helpful conversation, just to more conspiracy theories.

once again same tactic? LOL
look at the videos read the articles; the links and threats are there, if you take time to read beyond the ONE ARTICLE you quoted you will get better informed and educated.

However is pointless to argue with blind retards such as your-self

 

[sy barite]

None of your links support your statements. You claimed you read the article months ago. You claimed Trump used it in his campaign. You've proven neither of those statements and continue to lie. Sorry if the truth hurts.

 

[Hornet]

So, here are a few scenarios for you to comment on the cause of death

1. Someone is diagnosed with terminal cancer and they have 2 months to live. Driving home from the doctor in complete shock they get into an automobile accident and die on the scene. Is the cause of death cancer or automobile accident?
2. Someone is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and have about 2 years left. Their house burns down while they were sleeping and they die. Is the cause of death Fire or Alzheimer’s?
3. Someone with hypertension and needs to have stents put in but then they are shot to death in a random shooting. Is the cause of death the shooting or hypertension?
   
   now apply that logic to Covid-19 and ask whether the hospitals and coroners are applying it consistently.

this is a long read for determining cause of death

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/misc/hb_me.pdf

Essentially it says refer to WHO, it’s a judgment call, and two causes can be listed (1. Immediate cause, and 2. Underlying cause) such as pneumonia due to AIDS or renal failure due to Type 1 Diabetes