Statistics

Infections Drop! Experts Baffled! — Coronavirus Update LII

EXPERTOLOGY

The Daily Mail headline is that “experts” were “baffled” that coronadoom “cases”, by which they mean infections, fell by 50%, and that (in another headlines) they were “plummeting“.

One of the headlines, like many in the media, pointed to the “highest death day evah!” It wasn’t. That was back on 15 April when over 6,000 doom deaths were reported. Since day one I warned us that reporting and reality don’t match up, not in medical data. Check for yourself and you’ll see last week’s “highest death day evah!” was obvious a reporting trick.

The media is the enemy of the people.

Incidentally, it’s worth your time to enter “experts baffled covid” (or coronavirus) into search engines, focusing on news. Many headlines going back to last March. A lot of expert bafflement! But no shortage of confidence that quarantining the healthy and sick together, and that masking masklessness a federal crime are terrific ideas.

Anyway, regular readers will know that since early December (maybe before? I lost count) we have been making one of the easiest predictions that can be made: that deaths would peak in mid-January or so, and would then begin to fall. Because this happens every single year without exception and for the same reasons: voluntary lockdowns due to the cold weather.

We all start heading in late fall, the bugs circulate, and the bodies start piling up in December, with the peak, again, in early January. By the end of January, the most susceptible die off, and the rates go down.

Deaths of all kinds.

Meaning a guy who had a cardiac and keeled over after New Years died in fact of an MI. But that he also got a bad cold, or flu, or bronchitis, or whatever, pushed him over the edge.

Only this year, if the man got the doom, instead of putting heart attack on the death certificate, they’d instead put the coronadoom.

The drop can’t be vaccines, not yet, not fully. It can’t be the lowering of Ct—the Biden effect—resulting in lower recorded infections, thus lower recorded hospitalizations and deaths, not fully.

But it can be mostly the weather. As it always is.

Speaking of cowardly experts, this:

For when this tweet dies of coronavirus in 7 days, it reads, “Calm yourselves, cowardly experts. The flu, the common cold, syphilis, ebola, many, many others, including the most deadly of all, rabies, will always be with us. The coronadoom is just one more” with a link to cowardly experts WSJ piece.

EXCESS DEATHS

From reader BD comes this bit of hilarity: Risky driving: US traffic deaths up despite virus lockdowns.

The number of people killed on the nation’s highways rose 4.6% in the first nine months of 2020 despite coronavirus lockdowns that curtailed driving early in the year.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that 28,190 people died in traffic crashes from January through September of last year, up from 26,941 in the same period of 2019. Final statistics for the full year won’t come out until fall.

Authorities blamed the increase on risky driving behavior that developed when there were few vehicles on the road early in the pandemic.

“Preliminary data tells us that during the national health emergency, fewer Americans drove, but those who did took more risks and had more fatal crashes,” the safety agency said in a letter addressed to the nation’s drivers.

More deaths caused by government “solutions”.

CULT OF THE MASK

Or, an old man becomes an old woman.

BOOK

The Price of Panic.

Website of similar name: price of panic.

THE NUMBERS

Sources: daily tests, CDC official toll number one, number two (the old weekly file, now suspect). Deaths by age. Covid & flu. WHO flu tracker. All current as of Monday night.

Our interest this week is the expert bafflement. How could “cases” be dropping when experts predicted otherwise?

Here are the daily tests:

Testing on the way down, which certainly means a lessening of the panic. We’re still in the thick of it, though, and won’t be out until we fall to (rough guess) fewer than 200,000 a day.

Every positive test the media falsely calls a “case”, when it is only an infection with varying degrees of seriousness—and most are not serious. The media really does not know how to tell the truth.

As with last week, here’s even better news, the positivity rate of the tests. You’ll recall two weeks ago we discussed how the WHO told people to lower the PCR Ct rates, which should produce fewer positives—and fewer false positives.

Notice carefully this chart has nothing to do with the number of tests. Positivity wouldn’t, per se, fall because testing fell.

Meaning some thing, or things, are making this disease fade into the background—there, to join all the other ones which have plagued us since Eve first said, “Equality!”

Fewer official positive tests mean, necessarily, fewer attributed coronadoom deaths, and also fewer “cases” (infections).

What is causing this? The lowered Ct is certainly part of this. But also the weather, as you’ll see next. Deaths of all diseases always drop starting the end of January. The vaccines, even though not widely administered, likely accounts for some of the drop, too.

CDC weekly ALL CAUSE death counts, or the Perspective Plot, from late 2009 until now. The late drop off is late counting: it takes up to eight weeks to get all data. We need to look at all cause deaths because we can’t quite trust the attributed COVID numbers.

The black line is deaths of any kind. The red is COVID. The blue line is flu+pneumonia (it’s the pneumonia that kills most flu patients). The blue is estimated starting mid year 2020 because CDC stopped separate reporting on flu. The suspicion is some flu and pneumonia deaths are being attributed to COVID.

You can see the initial peak in 2020, when the virus first hit in the northeast, and then a smaller bump when it spread south and west. The January bump now is in line with what we expected.

And, as expected, and what baffled the experts, is deaths begin to drop in February.

DEATHS ALWAYS PEAK IN MID JANUARY, THEN DROP. EVEN WITHOUT GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION. PLEASE PASS THIS INFORMATION ON!

The January peaks are caused when we enter our voluntary lockdowns in winter, spreading bugs. This is also the “solution” governments hit upon to stop the spread of bugs. Lockdowns kill.

Here is the CDC deaths “involving” COVID.

Even with late counting it’s clear attributed deaths are on their way down—as non-experts have been predicting.

There is also concern some of these attributed deaths are flu or pneumonia and not COVID per se.

Here is another way to look at all deaths, the week-of-the-year all-cause deaths.

The 2020 estimated “excess” deaths (using my extrapolation model) are closing in. About 460 thousand. This will rise a bit with late counts. Not as much as last week, I think.

IMPORTANT: these are not all COVID deaths! They include deaths from the “solution” to COVID, too. Plus increased suicides, septicemia and other iatrogenic kills, cancers, heart attacks, and everything else due to lockdowns. Like car crashes, as we saw above. Plus, there were over 80,000 drug overdose deaths last year.

The green line at the left are 2021 numbers; obvious under-counts for the last three weeks.

Flu is still missing! CDC found one pediatric death for flu this season. One! Here is the WHO’s global flu tracker, which still shows flu has gone missing everywhere:

Flu is still gone the whole world over. Leading us to suspect some COVID deaths are really flu+pneumonia.

Here is the CDC official population mortality rates for the all causes other than COVID, and “involving” COVID (with and of; “involving” is CDC’s word).

Here are the same population fatality rates in tabular form:

POPULATION FATALITY RATES
                 Age     COVID OtherCause
1       Under 1 year 0.0000120    0.00500
2          1–4 years 0.0000015    0.00022
3         5–14 years 0.0000016    0.00014
4        15–24 years 0.0000140    0.00083
5        25–34 years 0.0000580    0.00160
6        35–44 years 0.0001700    0.00240
7        45–54 years 0.0004800    0.00430
8        55–64 years 0.0012000    0.00950
9        65–74 years 0.0029000    0.01900
10       75–84 years 0.0073000    0.04600
11 85 years and over 0.0200000    0.14000

No matter what age, there is at least about a 10 times or larger chance of dying from something else then COVID. If you’re under 44, the COVID risk is tiny. Our level of fear is in not in line with the actual risk for the majority of the population.

About masks in depth, see this article and this one. I am also working on a comprehensive article about masks. Hint: they do not work.

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Categories: Statistics

24 replies »

  1. No matter what age, there is at least about a 10 times or larger chance of dying from something else then COVID. If you’re under 44, the COVID risk is tiny. Our level of fear is in not in line with the actual risk for the majority of the population.

    Not entirely true
    400 times bracketed at 1 year
    100 times bracket at 1-4 years
    ~90 times at 5-14
    ~60 at 15-24
    ~25 at 25-34
    ~15 at 35-44
    ===============
    ~9 times at 45-54
    ~8 times at 55-64
    ~6.5 times at 65-74
    ~6.3 times at 75-84
    7 times over 85

    So 44 is the cut off for 10%
    Depending on your definition of “tiny”, I’d peg that at 25

    A guy (50’s) from work who’d been MIA since October/November, came in yesterday
    He went to the emergency with tinnitus. Tested positive. (Tinnitus and Covid Headache are a thing)
    Went to emergency 7 times, briefly hospitalized 4.
    In building workers at about 25-35%.
    He worked closely with one other person – that person tested negative throughout 14 days
    He masked up. Took dog out for a walk. Went to the store once a week.

    Government can’t stop this thing

  2. As I have sarcastically pointed out before at least the coronadoom has cured the flu. One death this year is amazing!
    On a much more serious note my doctor asked me if I was planning on getting the vaccine and I told her no. I said that I have had too much of a history with allergies and since there were reports of allergic reactions I did not feel that it was worth the risk to me. She then said aren’t you afraid of dying of COVID and I said no. If I was afraid of dying of things I would be living a miserable life. I just live my life and take each day as it comes. Something will kill me someday but I can’t live my life worrying about it. She did not really have an answer for me on that. I would have just pointed out to her that with the amount of allergies that I have that could kill me everyday I can’t just run around in fear. Almost every bit of food out there says it could have trace amounts of tree nuts and they can kill me. I can’t live without food and I am allergic to soybeans as well so vegan is out too.
    Life must be lived and should not be lived in fear. I hate the state of the world today. I wear a mask because they are required at my job and everywhere I go not because I feel that they do anything. I have now been pointlessly tested 3 times and *gasp* I have been negative 3 times. The 1st two times were just because I had a cold and instead of treating it I got tested and sent home for 14 days (insert eyeroll here). The 3rd time was just because my doctor wanted me to get an EEG. I was required to get tested just to get electrodes placed on my head and get my brain scanned. Insanity

  3. John B(): Exactly how Covid government policy kills. People are afraid to go to the ER and then die of a heart attack, etc. Your friend went to the ER and it worked out that he lived anyway. (I know tinnitus is not fatal, one just wishes it was sometimes.) However, the government only wants you to fear Covid, so they are willing to kill in any of a dozen other ways to keep the Covid narrative going.
    *******
    expert=baffled

    I ask the same question on commercials as Rather. The ONLY show I watch that has masks ALL the time except where appropriately removed is “911”. They have their pretty little faces covered in most of the show. I figure that’s gutsy for TV. They even cover the inability to understand speech, etc. Meanwhile, NCIS variants, etc all run about unmasked, as do most on TV. So forget commercials for now—cover those overpaid mugs on ALL shows. Who cares what they look like or sound like? There’s closed captioning. Learn to use it.

    It’s the fault of the men who fought WWII that we have soy boys. Tell Aunty O’Leary to blame those to blame. The men who fought WWII raised the fathers of the soy boys of today. It traces directly back to the WWII fathers. Her heroes from WWII are masking up as well, as are their sons and grandsons.

  4. The best sentence taken out of this: “The media is the enemy of the people.” If you blindly follow what the media says these days one could be called a fool. Quoting a great TV show, The X-Files, “The truth is out there.” You just won’t find it coming out of the media as it doesn’t fit the agenda. Who knew it would be so difficult to find truth these days. With everything in life becoming easier through technology and advancements in all areas of life somehow we lost the most vital part of living.

  5. Sheri

    Yes – I didn’t complete my thought properly

    Government can’t stop this thing; but doing a hell of a lot to keep it going

  6. I’m slightly off-topic here, but this is too good to not mention. Our local public health authority is concerned about misinformation in the age of WuFlu, so they have created a how-to web page. Among other things, they recommend Snopes as a useful “fact-checking” resource. Snopes?! Really?! Confused experts, indeed.

  7. I tested positive for Covid-19 on January 31. Experienced first symptoms on the 29th. Finished quarantine yesterday. I’m a 55 y/o white mail in very good physical shape. The entire experience was slightly worse than a typical upper respiratory infection and/or flu, but not as bad as a strep throat infection. High fever and for about 24 hours, followed by some body aches and have lingering congestion. Unfortunately, passed it to wife. Her experience is similar to mine. Two of my kids in college were infected in January and their experiences were similar.

    All in all, I would say that having the virus was not significantly worse than some of the reactions to the vaccine people seem to be experiencing.

  8. Last week the CDC reported 25 positive flu tests. Across the entire nation. In a week that is always at the height of flu season. With a positivity rate for tests of .1%. This is so low that it literally cannot be believed. Even experts just hand wave it, since they know doing anything else will endanger their grant money.

    I’m still fascinated by the question of how they will transition away from this as COVID cases continue to “mysteriously” drop. If they start being honest with influenza cases there will be a huge spike in influenza rates, beyond what we’ve ever seen before. Maybe they find that acceptable since it’s another way to spread panic, but probably not. It would be almost impossible just to hide deaths from respiratory diseases altogether.

    I also don’t think it is possible to smoothly transition from one type of death to the other. This is because I do not believe that most people reporting the deaths/cases are consciously trying to fool the public. They are simply following guidelines which make COVID override everything else and which make it extremely easy to attribute things to COVID. You can get them back to normal by changing those guidelines, but you can’t say something like “okay, for this week treat 70% of influenza cases as COVID and 30% as influenza, then next week make it 60% and 40% etc.” I don’t think that most people would be wiling to follow such a blatant fraud.

    So, what will end up happening to the influenza counts?

  9. No matter what happens with “cases,” hospitalizations, official deaths, etc. dropping, they will always find a reason to keep the fear-mongering and panic going at this point. Variants and mutations are now the big thing some are pushing – especially in Britain where they are raving over the so-called South African Variant (query: Why is “South African Variant” an acceptable name, but not Wuhan Flu, China Virus, etc?) – as excuses for why we can’t ever end the mask cult, anti-social distancing, etc. The tyranny will never end unless and until there is simply mass refusal to play along and people finally wake the F up.

    I didn’t realize Dan Blather was still alive until I saw his inane tweet above. All too typical of the self-righteous performative paranoia and virtue-signalling we’ve seen from others in the media. The same media twits who tweet so excitedly about BLM/Antifa riots and people celebrating Biden’s “victory,” claim to be fearful and outraged at people celebrating a Super Bowl win, daring to eat out, etc. It’s only those the Left doesn’t like who are apparently at risk of being “super-spreaders,” since the virus is very smart and politically savvy! And the usual anti-white Left has been in full attack mode against Tom Brady for the mortal sins of not wearing a muzzle and also refusing to disavow Trump (and, of course, simply daring to be both white and good at football). The most puke-inducing thing I’ve seen recently, though, was Jill Biden’s inane commercial telling people to wear a mask even while outside walking the dog alone. Just sickening. What a ridiculous culture this is.

  10. PaulH: If one needs to make a “fact checking” page or refer to one, you know they are lying. People who are truthful figure the truth speaks for itself.

    Rudolph: Flu is a thing of the past. Covid destroyed it.
    ******
    Not sure we need a new thing to fear–the disaster Joe brings us may be enough. I fully expect Anifa to return to burning cities, illegals to bring in all kinds of disease and crime, and unemployment to soar. Who needs Covid?

  11. Dennis: ”What a ridiculous culture this is.”

    Indeed. But that’s not our culture; it’s theirs — that trashy, depraved, shitty culture is the Overlord’s “culture”. We have Mozart, and Shakespeare, and St. Thomas, and Jesus Christ, and Dante, and Milton, and Dickens. The Overlords have Ron Jeremy and that twerking singer chick, and Tony Eczema. The Overlords are shit. They’re ridiculous. And they know it. They’re good at corruption, and sucking up money, and fooling fools, but nothing else. Garbage people.

  12. I stand corrected: NCIS is now wearing the **** masks. Television is officially stupid and worthless. If I wanted to watch bank robbers, I’d stick to old westerns. A society of people looking like armed robbers officially is stupid and worthless. I guess viewers are no longer needed for these shows. I don’t watch TV to see the crappy life our Overlords gave us.

  13. Influenza is gone now because of COVID, but what happens in the future? If you continue assigning the vast majority of influenza deaths to COVID, then COVID never goes away. That might be what they are aiming for, but even leftists politicians are starting to back off. This is probably due to a combination of getting Biden into office and growing signs that the public isn’t going to take this anymore (such as the Italian restaurant revolt).

    So if COVID needs to go away (or at least down to its actual levels without artificial pumping), influenza naturally comes back.

  14. The disappearance of flu seemed strange at first. Until you learn that we have seen this before. It’s very uncommon to have two widespread viruses in a population at the same time. One virus tends to win out over another. We saw this early on during the swine flu pandemic. France had a surge of Rhinovirus when other European countries were seeing their swine flu surge. France didn’t have their surge of swine flu until later – after the Rhinovirus had subsided.

    The reproduction rate of flu is barely more than 1, so when Covid 19 became the dominant bug, it didn’t take much to get its reproduction number below 1, and that is the magic that makes a bug disappear. I highly suspect that with the combination of 1. A large fraction of the US being infected and recovering from Covid, 2. A large fraction of the US already having natural immunity to Covid and 3. More than 39 million already vaccinated and growing quickly, the viruses days are numbered. The reason the “cases” are dropping so quickly? The reproduction number of Covid is now very low. I would suspect it’s close to 1 if not already below it. If it’s still greater than 1, then the continued vaccinations will soon send it below 1 and Covid will quickly disappear.

    The plummet is not temporary. It’s crashing hard and will be in the quiet background bugs soon. We don’t even need to vaccinate 100 million. It’s already not finding enough “hosts” to propagate. Personally, I’ll probably get vaccinated once it’s available because I was once hospitalized, barely able to breathe, from a bad virus 26 years ago. I’d rather not risk going through that again.

    The main concern at this point is if the vaccine will fail against any of the variants or guaranteed to be even newer variants. But, I hope at this point, we can simply slightly alter the current vaccines to beat back any new surges that occur from variants, wherever they occur.

    And I hope all of this nonsense will come to and end and that our new advances in vaccine technology can prevent this from ever happening again. The panic has been ridiculous!

  15. I don’t get where the confidence that vaccines will stop “surges” of “cases” come from. The manufacturers of the vaccines do not know if their vaccines prevent transmission and in fact they cannot even test for this. No one knows if the vaccines stop transmission at any level. All the information is about controlling the severity of symptoms.

    According to the CDC itself:

    We also don’t yet know whether getting a COVID-19 vaccine will prevent you from spreading the virus that causes COVID-19 to other people, even if you don’t get sick yourself.

    https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/faq.html

    The situation is the same as for the flu vaccines, which we know by experience do not prevent there being a “surge” in influenza every year (though they likely do prevent many deaths from the flu).

  16. I’m age 51… caught COVID in Mexico visiting wife’s family… Sadly, it killed the patriarch! (Eldest, 83, died of Lung Complications from COVID, oldest son, 55 and a freaking Medical Doctor, seriously hospitalized). Me? I just had a headache and felt bad for one day. Slept 12 hrs, next day… nothing (My wife, same). Everyone else in the house caught it too (ages from 13 to 76), minor symptoms. Weird! (no?)

  17. Are the allergists studying this? I still can’t wrap my head around how it can be so deadly for some and so insignificant for others.

  18. It’s the vaccines, mostly, not the weather. It’s also probably the fact that the holidays and the election are over, (both of which accelerated spread of the disease).

    Here’s a pair of graphs:

    https://sealevel.infoworldometers_covid_us_daily_new_cases_vs_ourworldindata_vaccine_doses_administered_2021-02-23c.png

    The top graph is “daily new Covid-19 cases” in the United States, from worldometers.

    The tiny graph at the bottom is the number of vaccine doses administered per 100 population, in the United States, from ourworldindata. As of Feb. 22 we’re at 19.19 jabs per 100 population, and we’re averaging about 3 million additional jabs per day.

    The reason the bottom graph is so small is that I scaled it down to match the horizontal (date) scale of the top graph, and it only extends from Dec. 20 (when vaccinations began) to Feb. 22. Here’s a full-sized version:

    https://sealevel.info/ourworldindata_covid_us_vaccination_doses_administered_2021-02-23a.png

    (Note that the two “notches” in the big Nov.-Jan. peak reflect diagnosis & reporting delays due to the Thanksgiving and Christmas / New Years holiday periods.)

    Most early vaccinations were of people who are at greatest risk of coming into contact with infectious people (to slow the spread), and of people who are at greatest risk if they contract the disease (esp. in nursing homes). It takes a few weeks for antibodies to build up, so the decline in new cases began just about exactly when we the first people vaccinated began to get significant partial immunity. It is clear that those vaccinations are bringing down the number of new cases.

    Some folks had worried that, because there’s a theoretical possibility that some vaccinated people might be able to contract the disease and become asymptomatic carriers of, the vaccinations might not reduce the spread of the disease as rapidly as we hoped. It is now clear that that worry was misplaced: the new case rate has already decreased by about 72%.

    Fatality rate changes lag changes in the new case counts by two to three weeks, but the daily fatality count is decreasing, too. It’s down 40% from its peak, so far.

    The federal government made many mistakes in their handling of this pandemic, but “Operation Warp Speed” was not one of them. It is a big success, which is saving thousands of lives.

    There’s no reason to think it could be the weather, because the sharp decline in the number of new cases began in January, in the dead of winter. Most years, flu cases don’t decline much until March, as you can see in this CDC graph. “Week 1” means the first week of January:

    https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/index.htm#ILINet
    https://sealevel.info/ILI06_small_flu_2021-02-23.png

    My other data sources are here:
    https://sealevel.info/References_for_2020-12_Burton_op-ed_in_WashingtonTimes.html#rollout

  19. Burton,

    It’s the weather. Like it is every year, from time immemorial, as the perspective plot proves.

  20. Huh. I wonder why that “pair of graphs” link didn’t work?
    Trying again, 3 ways; maybe one of them will work:

    https://sealevel.infoworldometers_covid_us_daily_new_cases_vs_ourworldindata_vaccine_doses_administered_2021-02-23c.png
    https://sealevel.infoworldometers_covid_us_daily_new_cases_vs_ourworldindata_vaccine_doses_administered_2021-02-23c.png

    “Seasonal flu” is called that because it ebbs and flows with the seasons, being worst in late winter, and improving when springtime arrives. Most years, in the USA, the daily number of new flu cases peaks in February, and declines in March, as the weather warms. The worst month for flu season is usually February, as you can see here:

    https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/season/flu-season.htm

    But Covid-19 cases started declining in January, in the middle of winter. January is the coldest month of the year in most of the USA, and February is second-coldest:

    https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/temperature

    The U.S. all-time worst day for number of new Covid-19 cases was Jan. 8, at 308,013 new cases. The 7-day moving average peaked Jan. 4-11 (mid-date Jan. 8), at 255,311 cases/day.

    January 8 was one week before the exact middle of meteorological winter. (Jan. 8 was the 19th day of astronomical winter.) By Jan. 31, daily new cases were down to 111,509. The 7-day moving average was down to 136,485 cases/day Jan. 28 – Feb. 3 (mid-date Jan. 31). It has continued to decline through February, which is normally the worst month for flu.

    The latest figures are that the 7-day moving average is down to 69,579 for Feb. 16-22 (mid-date Feb. 19), a 72.75% decline from the Jan. 8 peak.

    In a typical year THIS (late February) is the very peak of the flu season. (This year is not typical; there’s been very little flu this year, presumably because Covid social distancing has largely prevented the spread of flu.) If it was really “the weather” then Covid-19 case numbers would have been worsening since early January, rather than declining by 72.75%.

    It’s summer in Brazil, yet their all-time worst day for reported new Covid-19 cases was Jan. 7, 2021, one week before the middle of their meteorological summer. Their 7-day moving average peaked at 54,804 new cases/day Jan. 6-12 (mid-date Jan. 9). It is down less than 14% to 47,260 for Feb. 16-22 (mid-date Feb. 19).

    If it’s the weather, then why are the numbers so bad in balmy Brazil?

    “Daily new cases” data sources:
    USA: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/#coronavirus-cases-linear
    Brazil: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/brazil/#coronavirus-cases-linear
    (Check the box after “7-day moving average” and then hover your mouse cursor over trace in the “Daily New Cases” chart.)

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