Wednesday, August 24, 2022

The Mystery of Unaccounted Excess Deaths in the US

By April 2022, the number of reported COVID deaths (993,739) accounted for almost all of the CDC estimate of excess deaths (about 1,080,000).

  • The official narrative will tell you that most of the difference is missing Covid deaths - people who died from Covid but were not diagnosed.
  • However, liberal coding rules, financial incentives, extensive testing, and a Covid-oriented mindset must have led to overcounting of COVID-related deaths.

Sources of data

  • Three sources of data were used to check the robustness of the main results (qualitatively), and to obtain a range of estimates:
  • CDC excess death file (weekly estimates), from which it is also possible to compute weekly Covid deaths.
  • (cumulative by each day) CDC Covid death file, from which weekly deaths can be computed
  • Our World in Data (OWID) website
  • Cutoff dates for selected periods were dictated by weekly end-dates in the CDC excess file.

Unaccounted excess deaths

  • Data from an 18-month period (April 2020-September 2021) ending observations before the return of the flu
  • Number of deaths differs among the three sources by a few percentage points
  • OWID count is lower than CDC count, but its estimate of excess deaths is higher
  • The disagreement on Covid deaths between the two CDC sources is unclear

Three consecutive periods

  • Review of weekly estimates revealed two periods with a significant percentage of unaccounted excess deaths (April-December, 2020 and June-September, 2021), separated by a five-month period (January-May, 2021) in which the opposite was observed: the number of Covid deaths exceeded the estimate of excess deaths.

First period

  • In the first nine months of the pandemic, the share of unaccounted excess deaths ranged from 11% to 27% depending on the source of data.

Interim period

  • At the beginning of 2021, the number of Covid deaths exceeded the estimate of excess deaths, indicating overcounting
  • A so-called Covid death that did not contribute to excess mortality was not caused by Covid
  • Misattribution of deaths to Covid during that five-month period was substantial
  • 1-quarter to 1-third of the reported deaths would have happened regardless of a COVID diagnosis
  • Direct evidence of misattribution requires reclassifying

Last period

  • Unaccounted excess deaths make up 26% to 43% of the excess mortality in these four months, as compared with 11% to 27% in the first nine months.
  • What has accounted for these 47,000 to 82,000 excess deaths?
  • The last period contained the rising part of the Delta wave (as of July).

Estimates of unaccounted excess deaths (April 2020

  • September 2021)
  • A conservative estimate of misattribution over the 18-month period would allow for just 10%.
  • 90% of reported Covid deaths were true COVID deaths
  • The remainder belong to the category of “unaccounted deaths” (15% to almost 30% of excess mortality).

Were these unavoidable pandemic deaths?

  • Many of these deaths would not have happened if the Covid pandemic were handled like a previous flu pandemic - without fear-mongering, without lockdown, without symbolic masks, and without disruption of normal life.
  • Who created these circumstances?

https://brownstone.org/articles/deaths/ 

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