According to an analysis by Luca Dellanna in Italy, a huge number of Italian deaths have been going unregistered.
Comparing death rates in Corona-afflicted towns in North Italy this March with the statistics from March during previous years, he estimates that the differential could be as high as a factor of 5.
If this can be validly extended to Italy as a whole, the number of deaths there (more than 10,000 as of today) may in fact be approaching 50,000. That’s already almost 10% as many deaths as the 600,000-650,000 experiences in a typical year.
Or, almost every second death in Italy now accrues to COVID-19.
Of course, the “if” is doing a lot of work here. Are these small towns – accounting for 180 deaths out of Italy’s 6,820 as of March 24 – representative?
Probably not:
I didn’t cherrypick the data: I took all data I could find from towns in Bergamo or Brescia province regarding March 2020 data compared to March 2019. Of course, there is some selection bias: the journalists that dug up that data looked for it in the worst-hit towns.
But the effect would still be non-negligible.
Incidentally, I’d be very surprised if things were otherwise in Wuhan. When I was observing its epidemic, there were plenty of reports of dead people being cremated without testing for COVID-19 (a cold, but not unreasonable, decision, considering the shortages of test kits).
In recent days, relatives of the deceased in Wuhan during those two months have been offered to pick up the urns containing the ashes of their loved ones. One estimate, admittedly extrapolated from one crematorium to Wuhan’s other seven – that is, making the assumption that these crematoria all had similar capacities – is that there are 45,500 urns in total. Back of the envelope calculations. China’s death rate is 7/1,000. Wuhan has 11 million people, but let’s count all 19 million in its metro area. That’s 19M * .007 *2/12 = 22,000 expected deaths for China’s hardest hit region. This is obviously considerably higher than the official death toll of 3,295 and suggests an effective doubling of the death rate for Wuhan during January-February. This is not that far off from what Italy as a whole might now be experiencing this March.
One suggestion is that overburdened healthcare systems meant that many people who needed other, non-Corona operations expired instead. This is nonsense. It is very rare that operations are vitally needed within a matter of 1-2 months for survival. And these rare cases would in any case have almost certainly been greatly exceeded by just the numbers of lives saved due to reduced traffic accidents. There have also been recent reports darkly insinuating that the loss of 15-21 million cell phone subscribers in China during the epidemic was associated with the deaths of the contract owners. This is complete nonsense.
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Yes, I’d seen a WestHunter post a couple of days ago making the same point based a Google translate of some Italian language sources (maybe this same one), and it seemed reasonably persuasive to me.
When vast numbers of people are dying, the health authorities probably have better things to do than test dead bodies for the virus.
Incidentally, remember a few days ago when I suggested that the skyrocketing death rate in NYC would probably lead Trump to “pivot” from his decision to send everyone back to work after Easter?
At the time I made the point, daily deaths in New York were running at around 50. Yesterday, they reached 140 and they’re now at 209 over the last 24 hours. They’ll probably be at around 1,000 per day within the next week or so, at which point the health system will collapse and deaths will quadruple.
Apparently someone around Trump can do math, and he’s now talking about imposing a strict quarantine around the Greater New York City area, including CT and NJ:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/28/politics/trump-new-york-new-jersey-quarantine-coronavirus/index.html
I wouldn’t be surprised if we see something like 100,000 NYC deaths by early summer.
I really can’t figure out what’s going on with all the numerous determined Coronavirus Hoaxers on these threads, who are still claiming “It’s Just the Flu!!!”
How long do you think it would take Italian authorities to crenate 6 million victims of the coronavirus?
imho, in many cases it’s just psychological reaction to horrible news which can be compared to very similar classical denial stage from 5 stages of grief and loss:
https://psychcentral.com/lib/the-5-stages-of-loss-and-grief/
This is beyond hysterical, this is not “just the flu”, it is in fact just a more potent version of the flu and many of the people dying from it already had one foot in the grave with multiple underlying health conditions, an Italian health official said that only 12% of people whose deaths have been attributed to CV were completely healthy.
This is of course something not to take lightly, but the measured being taken by various governments around the world are completely over the top, and one can’t help but wonder whether those in Western governments were rubbing their hands in glee at the possibility of cracking down on people, they are even thinking of detaining anyone they like, no doubt these people will all be political enemies like White Nationalists. I also think different governments are in a sort of competition to see who can be the most Draconian, this competition is fuelled by the media. Here on the UK we were going for the herd immunity strategy before Boris cucked out to the media pressure and started the lockdown.
This is a total overreaction. Just like the response to 9/11 was an overreaction (let’s assume Al-Qaeda actually did it), instead of stopping all non-White immigration and dropping a few bombs on some mountain sides in Afghanistan, we went ape. Likewise all this requires is all vulnerable people to quarantine while the healthy amongst is go about our normal business.
There won’t be more than 100,000 deaths in America alone.
That reminds me – non working week in Russia next week will probably save 2000 people from serious injury or death from road accidents.
The warmer weather in Moscow this weekend and start of next will save lives indirectly.
Numbers for either of those events far exceed deaths that will occur from Coronavirus in Russia. Flu kills about 30000 in Russia each year. Sure, Karlin’s point about extra length of hospitalisation is important–but it does not come close for coronavirus to have the same cumulative effect as flu.
US flu deaths 60k-90k each year.
The UK, which is badly effected, are anticipating corona to have exact same fatality numbers as flu, which is 6k-8k.
So, in the UK a double flu albeit with longer hospitalisation – no reason to completely change the country and shut down the economy–particularly given the high numbers of people in China who have already recovered – which should be treated as true, even with doubts about the number of those infected or dead from the disease over there.
At least watching videos last week about Italy – unlike Northern Europe – everyone has a mask in public recently, and “Italians visibly panic” now when seeing someone without one. However, from watching videos, usually they seem to be ineffective masks. But there is some improvement from last month, or something slightly better than nothing.
Still all these people are walking outside, without airsealed goggles (while eyes are one of the main “portal of entry” for viruses causing respiratory illnesses https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3591987/) and without respirators that allow a strong seal – so infections will continue at a certain rate, until the Italians only go outside of the home, using adequate personal protection equipment (complete sealing of eyes and sufficient filtration of air).
I am a bit confused. You say that coronavirus deaths in these places are 5X higher than the official numbers. Yet what these statistics appear to show is that overall deaths in these places are 5X higher than last year, which is not at all the same thing.
So there’s a big epidemic, and lots of deaths happen in hospitals and with a positive test result. Interestingly, there are several times more deaths than usual, even without the tested positive deaths. But because they don’t test dead bodies, nor do they have the capacity to take everyone to hospital (in fact, it’s recommended that people with mild symptoms should just stay home – which carries a high risk of death if their condition suddenly deteriorates), it’s highly likely that the extra deaths are also attributable to the same epidemic. Or do you have an alternative explanation?
I’m sure that you can just assume another 3,000,000 asymptomatic carriers in Sicily to reduce the mortality rate back to the level of the flu or below.
Apparently, there was an unusually high number of flu & pneumonia cases in Lombardy in the last three months of 2019. Some say it was an early appearance of coronavirus (unlikely.) Or something else is going around in addition to COVID-19.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy-timing/italian-scientists-investigate-possible-earlier-emergence-of-coronavirus-idUSKBN21D2IG
I’ve seen similar stories about other places (e.g. Western Ukraine.)
Why not keep a sample to be tested later?
Sorry, is it not correct that the figures cited by Karlin show that deaths are 5x greater than last year, rather than that coronavirus deaths this year are 5X underreported? That’s all I was saying.
Why the need for sarcasm? It doesn’t do you justice.
I do accept that there is a sudden rise in deaths in Bergamo Province (and much of Northern Italy). What the long-term effect will be, only time will tell.
Aaaah, grasshopper, you are getting warm…
It’s a hoax for natural-born chickenshits, sorry.
Take a look at-this link, Ron, showing Z-scores for mortality in Europe. It sure seems like deaths were worse three winters ago, all over Europe.
http://www.euromomo.eu/slices/map_2017_2020.html
Compare France then versus France now, or Spain:
http://www.euromomo.eu/outputs/zscore_country_total.html
Italian 15-64 year olds are better off this winter than 3 years ago.
http://www.euromomo.eu/outputs/zscore_country15.html
Now, there might be a lag in data collection, butinevery country?
There will be about 2.7 million deaths in the USA. That many last year. Will there be more than 2.8?
I can’t really figure out what’s going on with all these numerous doomsayers who are still claiming “the end is nigh”.
Sure it’s spreading at record speeds but unless you’re a meth head or had a triple bypass it seems pretty benign. Like chickenpox. You’re gonna get it. And like chickenpox there might be a slight chance of complications (I guess they vaccinate kids of that these days huh….what a bunch of Nancys)
Once it starts stacking bodies of young healthy people will I start to worry.
Looking through the deaths and finding a disproportionate number as elderly and already harbouring prior illness. Type 2 diabetics. Heart patients. Is this unacceptable to people? Someone with an already existing condition and old of age becoming even more sick through this virus. Is this something new? Am I missing something? Did we bring freedom and democracy to Death and no one told me?
Even the little data I can gather on younger causalities. Obese. Hypertensive. Heavy smoker. Alcoholic. Drug addict. Epileptic. Congenital heart disease……. okay…. complicated diseases become even more complicated with a virus. Understood.
I get it, healthcare is overwhelmed. If I should need a triple bypass myself I might not get it in time and pass away. I understand. I don’t think this hysteria helped that particular situation though…. people now swarm hospitals looking to get tested or see if their tiny little sniffle or their stubbed toe are symptoms of covid-19…
This is a nice wake up call. Too many unhealthy people in the world. Time to take your multivitamins and add push ups and some flutter kicks to your daily regimen.
Local stats are the most important. So what can we learn from the fact (assuming it is factual) that March mortality is 5 times higher in localities affected by covid? Italy’s annual mortality is 11/1000 which is 0.92/1000 per month. So there are 3.7/1000 extra deaths this year in March. To how many millions population can we apply this number? If only to Lombardy (10 mil) we get 37,000 extra deaths in March this year. Could it be true? If so we can understand now why they needed military to move corpses to cemeteries.
We need reddit-style nested reply threads, wading through comments is a torture. Please!
“I really can’t figure out what’s going on with all the numerous determined Coronavirus Hoaxers on these threads, who are still claiming “It’s Just the Flu!!!””
I think these morons are the result of a perfect storm of distrust of the mainstream media and average to sub average intelligence. Most of us here recognize the mainstream media as being an enemy of the people and a subversive actor, but we are smart enough to identify the rare instances where mainstream media coverage more or less aligns with reality, as is the case with SARS2.
The hoaxers are incapable of making this adjustment as their limited IQ only allows them to take an inflexible, blanket position that any “narrative” propagated by the media can only ever be completely untrue and pernicious. As a heuristic, this is basically correct 99% of the time, but we are currently in a Black Swan event. Then you combine this with the fact Trump’s early handling of this was disastrous and many of these people are still die-hard “God Emperor” larpers and you get these insufferable hoaxer morons who make the comment section painful to read.
Yes, there are the usual hoaxers who even claim that some of the victims are the crisis actors. However some skeptics make more nuanced arguments which goes as follows: The total of deaths due to flu and covid
Total=Dead(flu)+Dead(covid)
say, for March 2020 in New York state should be compared with Dead(flu) for February and January when there were no covid cases in NY yet and with Mar, Feb and Jan in previous years. The skeptics suspect that there might be an attribution error as people who were dying of flu have been assigned to covid casualty category because they tested positive for covid or because they were misdiagnosed. Such a comparison is not made because Dead(flu) stats are not provided and and not reported daily in the media. If they were the exuberance with which covid is covered by the media would be greatly diminished particularly if in some periods of time the Dead(flu) stats would exhibit also an exponential growth.
Actually, this commenting system dynamically toggles between the regular mode and “thread mode,” which is close to what you want. Just press the “This Thread” button and only comments that are part of that particular thread will remain visible. Then press “Display All Comments” to return to the regular mode.
Sure, I certainly understand what they’re saying, but the numbers don’t make any sense. For example, here’s some simple table I found showing daily deaths for the entire country from the early/mid 2000s:
http://www.applet-magic.com/mortality0.htm
Since NY is about 6% of the US population, we’d expect to see about 8 deaths per day for Flu+Pneumonia+TB, though higher in Flu season. Instead, it’s 200(!!!) It’s difficult to believe that the doctors are “misattributing” gun-shot wounds or cancer to the Coronavirus.
Anyway, if 200/day isn’t enough to persuade them, well, just wait a few days, and it will be 500/day or 1000/day…
I think it’s almost more plausible for them to argue it’s just a “government conspiracy” and the reported death totals are entirely fictitious. After all, I don’t live in NY—how would I know?
3-4,000
100k deaths would be 2X a bad-ish flu year.
It’s in the same family of viruses as flue; a coronavirus. Just like hanta is an arenavirus and I believe ebola and Marburg are called filoviruses or something.
But it’s new, or novel, so none of us have pre-existing immunity.
So I’m going to say we may see something between 300k-1M deaths in the US. 1M is a lot, but it’s still “only” about 0.33% of our population.
Thanks. I think you made a definitive argument by looking at the daily sums which clearly show that last few days in NYS are way above the expected flu death daily total while by looking at the monthly total for March may not be as persuasive. But for 30 days from March 15 it will be. Will the sum of covid skeptics and deniers be decreasing exponentially?
fyi: Influenza and pneumonia is 55k per CDC
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm
which is 150/day and 450/day of flu season and 27/day of flu season in NYS.
The last daily total in NYS was revised and now is above 300.
I think you are overestimating. I read an article on this topic yesterday. It is claimed that the crematoria are not the same in size which, when you think about it, is likely to be true. Why would a city build crematoria of the same size year after year? But we do not know if the focused crematorium is the biggest one, but I think it is likely to be and the article I read claimed it is.
Then there was a data list of last few years’ death counts in Wuhan. There were statistical variations in particular an uptick in 2017 for no particular reason at least not known to the author of the article.
Another factor is that the number of deaths in Jan in Wuhan probably was not very big given what we now know about the disease. You know, it is a slow one. The famous doctor, Li Wenliang, got the disease in likely Jan 8, and he died in Feb 8 I think.
For the data to be faked in Feb, it would have been too difficult because too many people are watching. To hide data, you’d have to coordinate the local officials so the sums are consistent. Actually, there were I believe more than one occasions, the inconsistencies being noticed, and officials apologized, although it turns out to be for ordinary reasons, such as when CT instead of swab testing was being used as a standard.
My own guesstimation is the total number probably around 5000. Also notice that right now there are still I think more than 2000 in hospitals. It is unlikely that they all survive, esp. when you think about that they been in hospitals for how long. So it might top 7000.
My recommendation is, people like you, spend so much time around these topics, and you are a “doomer”, should take some time off of your work everyday. Human psychology should be taken care of.
I don’t want to exaggerate here, so I will make a very modest claim only, which is certain to be true.
This is the best commenting system ever, and by a wide margin.
This is not proof of anything but it shows in a microcosm how problems are being massively over-exaggerated by faulty data collection.
https://www.falmouthpacket.co.uk/news/18314422.coronavirus-covid-19-symptoms-begin-sore-throat/
Short story, a group of people had the same Coronavirus symptoms I had/have. One of them had it bad enough to be tested and thus found positive but is now fine. The rest did not and recovered unrecorded.
It really isn’t a hard phenomenon to understand and the hystericals who fail to grasp it and typify those who point out that it is very likely very widespread as “hoaxers” are, at best, being ridiculously obtuse.
Places in lock down also have, not surprisingly, a far lower death rate from accidents. Far fewer car crashes, murders, bar fights, etc. Even suicides drop initially. ER traffic in NYC is almost all COVID 19 cases right now.
Also, as one wag noted, the US has finally solved the school shooting problem.
You still failed to address the point of the pneumonia cases clustering in a few cities, over the past few weeks or days, and showing exponential growth (except under conditions of a lockdown, but sometimes even so).
“Social distancing” or rather people isolating themselves in their homes as South Koreans have done for weeks does severely limit its spread. Indeed, it specifically locks it into certain hotspots even without government intervention as many fewer travel intercity.
Why do I need to explain the existence of pneumonia hotspots again?
should be compared with Dead(flu) for February and January when there were no covid cases in NY yet and with Mar, Feb and Jan in previous years.
It’s much more sophisticated than simply comparing deaths in the comparable periods in preceding years. Some “skeptics”, at least one I know personally, are saying that what may well be happening, time only will tell, is that deaths are being advanced by a few months — as happened, and has been documented, with the “canicule” in France in 2003.
So to test this alternative hypothesis, you will need to compare the deaths for the first six or 9 months (or even annual total) of this year with the corresponding figures in earlier (and eventually later) years.
There are undoubtedly three types who can be expected to downplay the danger who might post here:
1) Contrarian types, some who may harbor subconscious fear and are in a state of denial. Such types, once they decided that it was a “hoax” or “just the flu” will have to face some humiliation to admit they were wrong. Many can keep denying until they are personally affected.
2) Short-sighted and selfish people (or their shills/useful idiots) who want to suppress public fear and “get back to making money.”
3) Those who want to maximize the death rate (types similar to Bloomberg) to get rid of social net liabilities and “bed blockers.”
Type 1 converts were made in large numbers in January and February, as lack of testing meant it seemed nothing was happening in the US and American-Zionist Jingoism was used by the hand-rubbers to make the rubes take pleasure in the plight of the Chinese and Iranians.
They never had experience in such scale “projects” so they will probably move on to mass graves. There is a massive backlog of to be cremated bodies already.
Counting urns seems reasonable at first until you look at the details.
http://mzj.wuhan.gov.cn/tjxx/387166.jhtml
Wuhan cremated 56000 people in q4 2019. This is much higher than expected given population. Before you jump to aha! Virus started earlier, they cremated 55k in q4 2018. Wuhan simply serves as a centralized crematoria for much of the rest of Hubei.
Tens of thousands of urns have to be considered in light of Wuhan being in lockdown for 2 months. Even assuming no natural increase from population aging or covid deaths, you are going to expect 40000 urns or so
Going on trend, there was going to be 5000 extra deaths in Italy this year, but let’s assume that it could easily get upto 10000 extra for entirely normal reasons(that would be 0.6 of the 3.7/1000 that you talk of) . Then assume that because of Lombardy region’s massive air pollution and elderly that it has had an above average death rate for Italy anyway.
You can easily wipe out 1.1 of those “3.7 per 1000” extra deaths.
It’s highly contentious of course what should be defined as death from Coronavirus and death from being seriously unhealthy anyway (I certainly don’t regard the majority of type 2 diabetes cases as something that should massively accelerate death if having coronavirus) – but there is a theory that majority of those ( 2 out of 3)in Italy who died, would have died this year definitely, anyway – because of having 3 or more conditions ( any stats of mortality for those with the flu with 3+ conditions?)
Pictures of the military taking coffins could give a misleading image due to factors like –
Ageing Priesthood + abuse scandal leading to less people training to become priests – which could have created a deficit of them – in a country where deaths are increasing above births.
Of course I don’t know how it’s done, but doesn’t the Priest play a significant role in administration of the dead body in Italy?
More families wanting to cremate their dead relatives instead of burying them ( for reasons like greed, lack of burial plots?, less priests around to do a decent funeral service? Struggling economy?) so that buying a nice, more expensive coffin is an option taken up by less people – could have left a situation of less profitable undertakers and so less of them in business. This, with a lack of, or overworked priests in an increasing death sector is what creates the image of the military mass-moving the coffins if there is only a slight increase in fatality rate.
Thus one of the 20th century’s great mysteries shall remain unsolved.
It is inevitable that a high percentage of older people will eventually have some sort of heart condition, diabetes, breathing condition, high blood pressure, or becoming overweight. Even those who don’t smoke or drink excessively. Even a seemingly normal older person, after the fact, can be examined and a preexisting condition can be found. You think you won’t fall into one of those categories when you are 60, 70, or 80? Maybe not, but you have a high chance of doing so.
For most people, it is unacceptable and indeed horrible that a high percentage of their parents or grandparents will die, will end their life gasping for breath in some overcrowded hospital hallway.
What is your evidence for this rather weak debunking?
Except that, if death rates over two years aren’t significantly different, the lockdowners will be able to claim it was due to their intervention.
Having a control group is important to get at the truth. the Netherlands, and Sweden, have taken different approaches. The Netherlands is still pursuing herd immunity, last I checked. In two years, if questioning the mainstream narrative is still permitted (when have we repealed the extreme measures enacted after 9/11?), maybe Unz.com can revisit the figures.
I don’t think the virus is a hoax, but I do think it’s an example of not letting a crisis go to waste. There was near-universal opposition to the bailout in 2008. This time, with millions forcibly unemployed before the bailout bill, there was near-universal abuse heaped on the Kentucky GOP congressman who tried to stop it. The finance system was visibly broken in September at about the low point in Fed balance sheet. Maybe the explosion in fed balances and cases is entirely coincidental, and maybe the slightly increased death rate has been used to whip up a panic so that a broken financial system can be patched with chewing gum and bailing wire for another 5 years.
The chart you link is “average daily mortality.” It has a couple of data points for “average daily mortality for 15-44” in 2001 and 2007. I think you know that there won’t be any increase in average daily mortality for this group from the “pandemic.” The Z-score graph for Europe, including Italy, shows no spike for this group; only in Spain does earlier this winter show a spike for this group.
http://www.euromomo.eu/outputs/zscore_country15.html
By contrast, this is a disaster of early death for the older and sicker parts of the population, and deserves the word pandemic for them. Your use of daily average from a site that doesn’t specify its method of calculation (and giving one number STRONGLY suggests that the site is simply dividing total annual deaths by 365 and rounding, as reported at the site) suggests a possibility of not much increase in the daily average for this year. If it’s true that elderly and sick people die at rates over 20% after getting this scourge, then we might simply be pulling forward deaths from later in the year, ironically in much the way debt-based finance pulls forward future economic activity. Then the daily average deaths on that website won’t increase much at all, unless he goes to using monthly daily average deaths. I think March will show a slight increase there.
If we had had a good test one month ago, we could have locked down all the elderly and sick, and let the 15-44 or 15-64 group go about their business, as Sweden seems to be doing now. That choice was not available, but recent media reports show a surge in tests that can deliver results in short order. Combine the ability of people to know quickly whether they are infected with some advanced protection (face masks!) and we could realistically reopen the economy for the more than 50% of the population under, say, 60 years old. I’d love to see the heroic efforts directed towards the truly needy.
After all, the bailout has already been passed, so no need to unnecessarily burden people, unless the point of control is control. YMMV.
No, it’s a hoax for dumb people and shills. I watched a video yesterday that went as far as to suggest that no virus can be spread from person to person, and that a virus is just a bodily healing reaction to harmful outside stimuli. They have known this for 100 years since the Spanish flu. During the flu they used to take mucous from the infected and inject it into the healthy and not one person got sick. Now, whether that is true or not, I do not know, but I do know that at the most this is a yearly flu and the numbers bare this out as more people have actually died from the normal flu this year, than they have from the stupid and shills flu.
So; keep cowering (by and large), I guess…
https://youtu.be/KKkDpv_JB7w?t=71
Deniers? That’s a distinctly non-Unz.com term.
For most people, it is unacceptable and indeed horrible that a high percentage of their parents or grandparents will die
Wow. We really are pretty far gone. But I think you’ve put your finger on a reason why this society has panicked.
What is the logical basis for generalizing to Italy as a whole from the experience of Lombardy.
It has been repeatedly reported that the environmental conditions and immigrant character of that provence is unique. Accordingly the significant change in death numbers year over year for the month of March may not be attributable to the virus per se and not generalizable to other geographic areas.
It is possible that similar year over year for the month death counts will vary significantly for other parts of Italy, not to mention Europe as a whole, not to mention the whole world.
I am not a skeptic or denier. But, I also have enough statistics education to know the profound truth:
Italy’s annual mortality rate is 10.7/1000, according to Statista.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/568024/death-rate-in-italy/
With 60,500,000 people, that means we expect about 647,350 people to die annually. 55,000 monthly. Of course, a high death rate means that the following year has a lower death rate. The first year Italy hit 10.7, a bad flu year, the following year was only 10.1, meaning about 51,000 monthly.
So, if the Italian death rate holds at 10.7 this year, it’s actually an increase over expectations for a drop, from previous data. Still: what was the number of deaths in January, and the number of deaths in February, before Coronapanic? A recent article mentions over 10,000 deaths “from” (meaning: “with”) in Italy. Assume they’re all in March. Then you might expect total deaths for March to be between 55 and 65K. If they’re not over 55k for the month, then there’s really no increase in deaths overall.
Got any data? It’s hard to find.
the lockdowners will be able to claim it was due to their intervention.
That is for sure.
Here is an interesting article about Sweden — if you don’t read German the Google English translation is reasonable.
https://www.zeit.de/politik/ausland/2020-03/coronavirus-schweden-stockholm-oeffentliches-leben/komplettansicht
Ho boy, what’s with all this curiosity? Next you will want to know how many of the above had comorbidities, or how many Italian dead were classified as not related to COVID.
If the latter turns out to be zero or less, how will the Italian government get dispensation to breach EU rules on deficit? How will they ask for German cash with a straight face?
How will the various prophets of doom deny that we are purposely kept in the dark?
In Romania, we used to joke that everyone thinks they’re know-all when it comes to soccer, healthcare and corruption laws. To be honest, it’s not generalizable. Italians are even better at statistics, in particular if they are marginals reading tabloids. This blog has even longer posts on Game of the Lords.
In 2017, New York reported about 151,000 deaths, an average of 425 per day.
https://www.health.ny.gov/statistics/vital_statistics/2017/table31a.htm
Today I get a report of about 200 deaths in the last day in NY due to Corona. Maybe at the end of the month we will get a total count. If it’s significantly above 12,500, then there’s been some increase in overall deaths.
It was an easy winter in NYC. No blizzards, not much extreme cold. I would expect that to drive down the death rate for January and February. Might Jan-March actually underperform 2019? I’m pretty sure I won’t see this analysis at nytimes.com, but we will get it here.
Agreed. The data Ron provides are poor. For multiple reasons, no explanation how they were gathered, adjusted … They are outdated.
Makes one think, how the US deserves first world status. What is needed to assert anything of a judgement is the total all causes, mortality of the time-frame, average all causes, mortality of the time-frame (day, week) as of recent years (2010-2019 would be reasonable), and then as a second, the per cause counts of ditto.
Without overall death rates per time-frame going consistently up above the average overall death rates, there is little argument that Coronavirus deaths declared do nothing but push other causes of death away. If Coronavirus casualties appear as excess deaths on top of a normal total all causes death rate, there is a real problem then. Even if this would only be on a per population group basis. How can the public judge this, if the total death counts for the day, and for the week are withheld.
The mere absence the number for total all causes confounded death counts, is criminal manipulation. It has opened the door to manipulation by our governments, intentionally, and that is criminal practice. It reeks of how financial data are tweaked to trigger the psychology and impress on the surplus population. These are financial world commonalities of operating.
Nothing to do with science.
Look at euromomo.eu how death counts properly presented is done as a service to the public (EU data, it is a glitch in the armor of media and government manipulation). Note, the EU, Russian, and Chinese authorities apply the same principle of intentionally withholding the crucial numbers to make any calculations. (euromomo.eu is never referred at, and probably an artifact and never referenced in public communication).
That in itself is mafia practice. Individuals who do estimates on numbers that are meaningless, incomplete since they cannot be vetted, have no reference to the crucial total death count per day, do not explicitly mention these anomalies are implicitly conspiring. The best of models are worthless when the input is fabricated, has gaps, is biased, cannot be documented intentionally. This is what happens. Maybe the grander public does not grasp this, but that in itself is substance to rejecting any credibility of our authorities, our media and any collaborators not having the excuse of being cognitively debilitated.
I assumed the reports cited by Karlin that mortality rate for March is 5x higher in various towns of Lombardy than last year. If this is true for the whole of Lombardy which has 10 million residents then we get 37,000 more deaths in Lombardy in March 2020 than last year.
Covid and its impact is not distributed uniformly over Italy. Therefore one must look at data locally on the basis of smaller areas like Lombardy with 10 mil people and not at the whole Italy with 60 mil people. Not really sure what you are trying to say.
“the “canicule” in France in 2003” shows that large part of those killed by the heat wave had their life shortened by 1 year on average. That’s all. There is no question about what killed these people. Just like there will be no question about what killed people in coronavirus epidemic when we see a dip in mortality charts one year after. The direct cause is covid not their age and their comorbidities.
One last thing. Posted BEFORE the panic on February 27th, we have:
https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-cuomo-announces-record-breaking-total-number-flu-cases-new-york-even-number-flu-cases
February 13th:
https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-cuomo-reminds-new-yorkers-flu-cases-continue-increase-flu-season-expected-set-record
“Flu cases in New York this season are expected to set record-high levels since the New York State Department of Health began tracking flu cases during the 1998-99 season.
“As flu season has not yet peaked across New York, I urge everyone to remain vigilant and take simple precautions to protect themselves and their families,” Governor Cuomo said. ”
So it seems that this has been a record bad year for the flu in NY State, according to the
Governor. How many Corona deaths are actually due to the “record” flu season? We simply don’t know; we do know the governor predicted 6 weeks ago that the flu had yet to peak.
There are some hard numbers one can use to judge Corona by: Last week, 1,993 New Yorkers were hospitalized with lab-confirmed influenza. So far this season, there have been 15,541 flu-related hospitalizations.
So, 4000 hospitalizations a week would mean twice the rate that was seen from flu cases in January. That’s inarguably worse than the flu, assuming all 4000 are Corona alone, and not part of Cuomo’s previously-anticipated peak. Anyone got real numbers on that?
“Covid and its impact is not distributed uniformly over Italy. Therefore one must look at data locally on the basis of smaller areas like Lombardy with 10 mil people and not at the whole Italy with 60 mil people. Not really sure what you are trying to say.”
You really highlight what will make this hard to evaluate. I have little doubt that monthly figures for March 2020 will exceed March 2019. But most of our statistics are based on averages, and over a whole country. So I expect that COVID has pulled forward some deaths that might have occurred in the later months of this year; in other words, I expect that the death rate for June, 2020, will be lower than June, 2019, if this is true. If COVID accelerated death for a few months only, then there will be little change in the Italian annual death rate, which will get back-propagated to monthly averages from the annual total.
You’ll then see a March total that wildly skews upward, confirming the extreme impact, and a belly or hollow in the curve later in the year. It’ll be Intersting to read evaluations by Cochran, Ionnidis, and other commenters after that time period.
LOL, you know I meant “prematurely”, or “of this illness in the next few months.”
The hoaxers are incapable of making this adjustment as their limited IQ only allows them to take an inflexible, blanket position that any “narrative” propagated by the media can only ever be completely untrue and pernicious. As a heuristic, this is basically correct 99% of the time, but we are currently in a Black Swan event. Then you combine this with the fact Trump’s early handling of this was disastrous and many of these people are still die-hard “God Emperor” larpers and you get these insufferable hoaxer morons who make the comment section painful to read.
Must be great to have been hired to a Zeus like position, flinging thunderbolts about “limited IQ” at the little people.
THere is the distinct possibility that the people who are gaining power and control over their populations with the actions that Corona has given them the opportunity to undertake are actually telling the truth here, instead of the consistent untruths they espouse. The old definition of a gaffe in Dc is when a politician accidentally tells the truth. We cannot discount that. But you state this is 99% unlikely. I would think you’re right, except:
https://nassimtaleb.org/2020/03/coronavirus-black-swan/
It seems Taleb himself says this ISN’T a black swan. O, Zeus: thy thunderbolt hath struck thee in the foot.
Reported NY hospitalizations for influenza have fallen dramatically, from 2,000 in January/early February, to 334 as of 21 March. This is more or less in accord with the pattern observed in previous years:
https://www.health.ny.gov/diseases/communicable/influenza/surveillance/2019-2020/flu_report_current_week.pdf
(see esp. p 5)
“COVID has pulled forward some deaths that might have occurred in the later months of this year” – You seem to be distracted by the artifact of the superannuated death phenomenon. If we see a dip in mortality data a year form now it will not diminish the death stats for what is happening now it will only show that covid shortened life of some of its casualties by 1 year on average.
Yeah, I know, apologies for the tweak.
But it does strike me that we are losing our minds over this at a far different pace than the Spanish Flu people in 1918 (Italy 410,000 deaths alone!) because we’ve moved away from this understanding. I hope my parents pre-decease all their children, mostly because the saddest people I know are parents who’ve buried children. That’s one reason why using the word “war” with respect to this virus, as many politicians have done, strikes me as wrong: in war, fathers bury their sons, and in peace, sons bury their fathers. Spanish Flu was in that sense a war, given the accelerated death rate of younger people.
This is just a horror for the elderly, and all who love them.
Thanks for the link. It looks like Cuomo’s Feb 13th warning that the flu had yet to peak was delivered… right after the last week in which there were more than 2000 hospitalizations for the Flu.
Through March 21, about 8500 people 65+ hospitalized with the flu in NY State. That forms a good basis for comparison. If we do get a lot of elderly infected, we’re going to go far past that figure.
I point out a mechanism by which COVID might disappear entirely, if it’s only removing fewer than 8 months of life from each older Italian currently dying.
I would normally expect the Italian death rate this year to be BELOW 10.7, as it was in each of the two years that followed a previous 10.7 year. I’ll be on the lookout for people who claim that 10.7 this year means no COVID effect, since it should go down a bit if last year had accelerated deaths. Of course, the death rate is predicted to rise to 16/1000 over the next few decades, so maybe my expectation of a drop this year is wrong:
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/ITA/italy/death-rate
The other thing that makes a difference is that the lockdown is saving lives that might be lost to traffic accidents, street crime, etc. My guess is that that can be massaged out of the data. One irony of the lockdown would be a LONGER average life expectancy for Italy as younger lives are saved and older lives are lost; one 30yo not dying in a traffic accident saves as many life-years as 105 82-year-olds dying 6 months earlier than the expected 82.5 years.
In case you are not already familiar with this, which I find quite useful:
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/index.htm
Although I do wonder at times why people do not seem so concerned about the 155 influenza-associated deaths among children so far this year in the US — how many stories about them have you seen? — which, apart from the 2009 pandemic, are the highest since 2004.
Why are Italy and Spain in particular so badly affected? The common factor there seems to be that they are both ethnically Med countries.
I wonder if Meds are more susceptible than other groups, but it seems to be taboo to suggest there is a racial difference in susceptibility. The other possibility is that the Italian and Spanish health systems just aren’t as effective as that of say Germany, but it seems to be equally taboo to suggest that too. This issue can only be looked at from the assumption that all European countries and people are equal and the same.
Thanks, a link to real data is always an improvement.
Interesting that the CDC used the word pandemic about 2009. I don’t recall the pandemic. I will recall this one.
If we cared about children’s health, we might have spent some fraction of the 2$trln we just spent bailing out the people that we unemployed for Coronavirus to get our infant mortality rate to the developed world average. My recent calculations were we’d save about 12,000 children a year if we were only average. As you observe, there’s no media frenzy about that.
When this is all done, will we be smart enough to demand telecommuting at least most of each week/month for most white-collar jobs (other than medical personnel and teachers)?
We can keep the number of traffic fatalities and injuries substantially below “the old normal” permanently. As well as reduce air pollution and the cost of maintaining and repairing our vehicles.
All levels of government, banks, and large corporations should lead the way and move to a presumption that any job that can realistically, effectively be done by working online from home 3-4 days per week, will be.
For most of the people who still have to commute to work, the trip will be somewhat quicker, easier, and less stressful.
A lot of very old people.
https://i.redd.it/ar5ut6jozaw11.png
New report: https://www.newsweek.com/wuhan-covid-19-death-toll-may-tens-thousands-data-cremations-shipments-urns-suggest-1494914
Tallies with my Fermi estimate:
OT
Regarding Rehman Shukr, the deceased Pakistani IMF employee, I checked his Facebook profile again, and there was an interesting debate between two guys, apparently both Pakistani (and with lots of photos and apparently lots of existing contacts etc., so in all likelihood neither of them fake profiles), one of them claiming to be a friend of Rehman, the other claiming to know some of his friends (he specifically mentioned two of those by name). The first guy (so the alleged personal friend) claimed that he didn’t die of Covid-19 (and tested negative), rather of some other respiratory issue, while the other claimed that it was, indeed, Covid-19, and that his parents have also confirmed this to the press, and that friends of the deceased have also told him that personally.
Both of them seemed to agree that Rehman was asthmatic, and that the cause of death was some kind of respiratory illness. The debate wasn’t really resolved.
It must be noted that the debate was under the controversial post (where Rehman proposed to consider the economic costs of the lockdown to weigh against the death toll of the epidemic), and the friend of Rehman (who claimed it wasn’t Covid-19) was aggressively defending him. (“that’s not what he said, you plonk. And, FYI, he didn’t have corona.”) So he might’ve been motivated to lie in order to save posthumous embarrassment for his friend. (It’s possible he wasn’t tested at all – the post dates from March 21, and he apparently died on March 24.)
I’m not sure we’ll know anything more definitive, but he was very likely asthmatic, and the direct cause of death was some kind of respiratory illness combined with asthma.
Because they are inconsistent with the hypothesis of millions of untested asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic carriers bringing down the mortality rate close to the level of the flu or even below.
I checked your commenting history, but couldn’t easily find an explanation for this you might’ve given elsewhere, so you might just give the explanation here.
.
I don’t get why the possibility of there being ten times as many people with Chinavirus as have been found through testing is inconsistent with there being hotspots.
Humans aren’t totally random and the distribution of disease will fit certain strange unknown sociological patterns (and known ones too.) Furthermore, if we were all random particles unaffected by culture and reaction to the existence of the virus, there would still be some areas that rolled many 6’s in a row and some area that rolled none.
Bring in the daylight by showing a single number.
Let us know the fallacy in our logic. (amazing if there would not be any)
If for every day, we have the total mortality all causes confounded, both, together with the mortality of declared as Covid-19 cases (we the public are communicated the second number in “exponential” heights by the day). …Then,
Exponentiation stops at the total mortality of all causes number. Reaching beyond that number would be like thumping a concrete wall. The maximum of Corona deaths would be no larger ever then the total number of deaths for the day. That is the cork in the Covid-19 bottle regarding deaths. Any other facet of the issue can now be con-texted to above.
Without any other parameters known, even then, this same practice of comparing two numbers is a fair understanding of the phenomenon. If one wants, per location, over a week not a day, other parameters as a specific sub-group (say 65>=), taking into account corrections (the expectancy of what a virus does over time) whatever secondary adjustments one might control for would refine estimates, but ever, these two numbers would confine, hard-wall, the exponentiation hype on Covid-19.
The number of total mortality per day/week is kept from the public. This number has no technical reasons to be kept from the public. It is known, within short delay, (take a twenty four hour period for some employee to correct erroneous a number as put into a database real-time). If this is N-O-T the case in the US, then consider the US a third world country. The financial world, banking manipulates and mocks analysis of data globally real time. This should be titled a criminal endeavour, allows for the manipulation of the gullibility of the public at large. Using Covid-19 to play out and clean out the mess of accounting in the background, that is where the exponentiation is. Scaling the Ponzi scheme. Is it not a dichotomy, having real time location data for every single cell-phone, but not being able to come up with total mortality rates real time? Have a Google but no data to operate on. Should the surplus population be made to enter their own death counts?
Some have asked what is meant by “surplus populations”, in this context´s pertinence, it is meant to be the ones that are manipulated. Count us in?
In the mean time, please let us know where the fallacy is in pointing to the essential importance of that single number mentioned above total mortality all causes confounded per timeframe
The other side of the coin which the Italian media mainstream doesn’t report.
As of March 26, 2020 and out of a sample of 6801 COVID-19 patients dying, the most remarkable thing is that mean age of patients dying for COVID-2019 infection was 78 and that as far as the absolute number of deaths by age group, median age for women was 82 and median age for men was 78.
To point out also that in Italy life expectancy is 85 for women and 81 for men.
The second most remarkable thing is that out of a sample of 710 COVID-19 patients dying in-hospital for whom it was possible to analyse clinic charts , 2.1% of the sample presented with a no comorbidities ( 15 deaths ) , 21.3% with a single comorbidity (151 deaths ) , 25.9% with 2 ( 184 deaths ) , and 50.7% with 3 or more ( 360 deaths ).
Hence, there are only 15 patients with no previous disease who died of Coronavirus and represent only 2,1% of the sample above mentioned.
Reference:
https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/bollettino/Report-COVID-2019_26_marzo_eng.pdf
Anyway, the two samples from a statistical point of view are quite significant and if we extend these results to the totality of the data collected at national level which as of today ( reference: March 30, 2020 ) report a total deaths equal to 10779 and then it will turn out that 2,1% of 10779 is 226, which means that with a good statistical approximation so far throughout Italy only 226 Italians with no previous disease have died of Coronavirus.
In practice, out of about 60 million people residing in Italy, if we remove the approximately 24 million Italians with chronic pathologies (Report “OsservaSalute” end 2017), the result is about 36 million Italians with mild or zero pathologies, well, in reference to these about 36 million Italians with mild or no diseases, only about 226 Italians have died from Coronavirus so far which means that the death rate for Coronavirus of Italian people with mild or no diseases is equal approximately to 0,000627%!!
Furthermore, the Italian media mainstream have never reported the special report above mentioned and because of the fact that some Italian people are starting to smell the rat they still just say ( only sometimes ) that the Coronavirus is the real cause of death only for a minority of Italian people.
Welocome to the wildest Orwellian regime ever seen in Italy since the birth of the Italian Republic, 2 June 1946.
Best regards.
TheTruthSeeker, greetings from Italy.
“The second most remarkable ” – No really. More important is dealing with what Karlin here is citing: Do they have 5x higher mortality than last year? Did Wuhan had 9x higher mortality?
My recent calculations were we’d save about 12,000 children a year if we were only average.
Or how about hospital (or healthcare) acquired infections? Here is an article that concludes that 310,000 – 845,000 lives per year (in the US) could be saved at a cost that would be at most $25 billion, and perhaps as low as $3.5 billion. Note: billion, not trillion.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/50989358_Estimating_the_Proportion_of_Healthcare-Associated_Infections_That_Are_Reasonably_Preventable_and_the_Related_Mortality_and_Costs
Sorry, the above post is inaccurate, and I wasn’t able to edit it. The numbers presented are in fact the number of infections prevented, not the number of lives saved.
It should have read:
Here is an article that concludes that 24,000-54,000 lives per year (in the US) could be saved at a cost that would be at most $25 billion, and perhaps as low as $3.5 billion. Note: billion, not trillion.
@utu
Excuse me, I’m not an English native speaker and I was also in a hurry when I was writing that post and so I didn’t write properly because I had taken for granted a fundamental premise, here it is.
A. “The way in which we code deaths in our country is very generous in the sense that all the people who die in hospitals with the coronavirus are deemed to be dying of the coronavirus […] On re-evaluation by the National Institute of Health, only 12 per cent of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus, while 88 per cent of patients who have died have at least one pre-morbidity – many had two or three. ”, Walter Ricciardi, manager of WHO ( World Health Organization ), scientific adviser to Italy’s minister of health.
B. The president of the Italian Civil Protection Service , Angelo Borrelli, actually went out of his way to remind people of the nature of Italy’s fatality figures in a morning briefing on 20/03:
” I want you to remember these people died WITH the coronavirus and not FROM the coronavirus”
Source: https://off-guardian.org/2020/03/23/italy-only-12-of-covid19-deaths-list-covid19-as-cause/
Hence, when I wrote in my first post ” died of” or died from”, actually I meant and I mean “died with” ( except those patients with no comorbidities who obviously died from coronavirus ) which is quite different, I hadn’t written in this right way because as I’ve just told you at the beginning
I’m not an English native speaker, I was also in a hurry when I was writing that post and so I didn’t write properly because I had taken for granted this fundamental premise that in Italy is quite known among Italian people ( a very small minority ) who are interested in counterinformation about several matters of national interest.
Best regards.
TheTruthSeeker, greetings from Italy.
Can you comment on Luca Dellanna analysis?
Yes, I can, it’s quite simple, in the specific case of Italy in my last previous post I’ve already explained the reasons for which Luca Dellana analysis starts from very wrong premises and obviously as a logical consequence his conclusions are wrong.
Apart from that, here is the smoking gun given by two very meaningful charts:
First Chart.
Comparison made for each region of Italy between deaths of COVID-19 positive patients in the third week of March 2020 ( March 16, 2020-March 22, 2020 ) with average weekly deaths in March 2019.
Second Chart.
Comparison made for each province of Lombardy between deaths of COVID-19 positive patients in the third week of March 2020 ( March 16, 2020-March 22, 2020 ) with total death of March 2019.
Source:
“COVID-19: do they die with or from? Some reading keys starting from data regarding Lombardy”
by M. Cavallaro for “YouTrend”
25 March, 2020
https://www.youtrend.it/2020/03/25/coronavirus-si-muore-con-o-per-alcune-chiavi-di-lettura-a-partire-dai-dati-della-lombardia/
Best regards.
TheTruthSeeker, greetings from Italy
The answer about Luca Dellanna data should be very simple. Is his data accurate or not? Talking about causes of death and how cases of dying with and from covid are different has nothing to do with it.
“There have also been recent reports darkly insinuating that the loss of 15-21 million cell phone subscribers in China during the epidemic was associated with the deaths of the contract owners. This is complete nonsense.”
Do you have any evidence of “complete nonsense”? These numbers are found looking at the market reports from publicly traded cellphone companies. They can’t lie. So if they weren’t “lost” from the virus, then did they all forget to pay the bill? Methinks a person in lockdown would still want their cellphone. So where did they go?
At the first line of this article “Corona death in Italy 5x higher than official numbers?” there is a link regarding the analysis by Luca Dellanna, if anyone click on it, the headline of the analysis by Luca Dellanna is the following:
“Dying FOR the coronavirus or WITH the coronavirus?
The real number of deaths in Italy”
Hence, the key point of the matter is the same, the fundamental difference between Luca Dellanna and me is that he didn’t take into account at all the report “Characteristics of COVID-19 patients dying in Italy. Report based on available data on March 26th, 2020” published by the Italian National Institute of Health on March 27, 2020, which instead I’ve taken into account straightaway, in fact, I’ve pointed it out in my first post with its file in pdf, the reason might be quite simple: he published his article on March 24, 2020.
In practice, any logical and rational person can’t talk about “Dying FOR the coronavirus or WITH the coronavirus?” without taking into account the reports on “Characteristics of COVID-19 patients dying in Italy” published by the Italian National Institute of Health and not because they are the absolute truth but to verify if and how the Italian media mainstream ( TV and newspapers ) talk about it and as I’ve already said the Italian media mainstream have never reported these special reports and because of the fact that some Italian people are starting to smell the rat they still just say ( only sometimes ) that the Coronavirus is the real cause of death only for a minority of Italian people.
That’s it!!
However, here is the update.
“Characteristics of COVID-19 patients dying in ItalyReport based on available data on March 30th, 2020” by Italian National Institute of Health.
https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/bollettino/Report-COVID-2019_30_marzo_eng.pdf
The results are almost the same, it is worth emphasizing the following facts.
Deaths under the age of 50 years. .
As of March 30th, 112 out of the 10,026 (1.1%) positive COVID-19 patients under the age of 50 died. In particular, 23 of these were less than 40 years, 19 men and 4 women (age range between 26 and 39years). For 2 patients under the age of 40 years no clinical information is available; the remaining 15 had serious pre-existing pathologies (cardiovascular, renal, psychiatric pathologies, diabetes, obesity) and 6 had no major pathologies.
It is also noteworthy that the Italian media mainstream have never spoken about this fundamental aspect of the matter, only sometimes they still just say that the Coronavirus is the real cause of death only for a minority of Italian people.
Best regards.
TheTruthSeeker, greetings from Italy.