Covid-19 Deaths

Neil Ferguson is the British academic who created the infamous Imperial College model that warned Boris Johnson that, without an immediate lockdown, the coronavirus would cause 500,000 deaths and swamp the National Health Service…

Ferguson’s Imperial College model has been proven wildly inaccurate. To cite just one example, it saw Sweden paying a huge price for no lockdown, with 40,000 COVID deaths by May 1, and 100,000 by June. Sweden now has 2,854 deaths and peaked two weeks ago (May 6, 2020). As Fraser Nelson, editor of Britain’s Spectator, notes: “Imperial College’s model is wrong by an order of magnitude.”

• In 2002, Ferguson predicted that, by 2080, up to 150,000 people could die from exposure to BSE (mad cow disease) in beef. In the U.K., there were only 177 deaths from BSE.
• In 2005, Ferguson predicted that up to 150 million people could be killed from bird flu. In the end, only 282 people died worldwide from the disease between 2003 and 2009.
• In 2009, a government estimate, based on Ferguson’s advice, said a “reasonable worst-case scenario” was that the swine flu would lead to 65,000 British deaths. In the end, swine flu killed 457 people in the U.K.

Indeed, Ferguson has been wrong so often that some of his fellow modelers call him “The Master of Disaster.”

In a recent interview, Dr. John Ioannidis had a harsh assessment of modelers who predicted as many as 40 million people would die and the US healthcare system would be overrun because of COVID-19…

Ioannidis said medical data suggest the fatality risk is far lower than earlier estimates had led policymakers to believe and “is almost 0%” for individuals under 45 years old. The median fatality rate is roughly 0.25 percent, however, because the risk “escalates substantially” for individuals over 85 and can be as high as 25 percent for debilitated people in nursing homes.

“The death rate in a given country depends a lot on the age-structure, who are the people infected, and how they are managed,” Ioannidis said. “For people younger than 45, the infection fatality rate is almost 0%. For 45 to 70, it is probably about 0.05-0.3%. For those above 70, it escalates substantially…”

Laura Ingraham quotes CDC’S ‘Guidance for Certifying Deaths Due to Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)’ (April 2020)
“In cases where a definite diagnosis of COVID-19 cannot be made, but it is suspected or likely (eg, the circumstances are compelling within a reasonable degree of certainty) it is acceptable to report COVID-19 on a death certificate as “probable” or “presumed”.

INGRAHAM: So doctor, what’s the problem with that?

JENSEN: In short, it’s ridiculous. I spent some time earlier today just going through the CDC’s manual on how to complete death certificates and the parts that were specifically written for physicians, and in that manual it talks about precision and specificity and that’s what we are trained with. The determination of the cause of death is a big deal. It has impact on estate planning, it has impact on future generations. The idea that we’re going to allow people to massage, and sort of game the numbers is a real issue because we’re going to undermine the trust. And right now as we see politicians doing things that aren’t necessarily motivated on fact and science, the public’s going to… their trust of politicans is already wearing thin.

INGRAHAM: In that same guidance sheet on covid-19, it references the fact that basically this is a judgement call for doctors, and I read it. What goes on line 1, and what goes on line 2, and what goes on the final line, as far as contributing factors and ultimate cause of death. But they concede that it is a judgment call. Again, why is that not correct?

JENSEN: Let’s just take influenza. If I have a patient died a month ago, had fever cough and died after three days and maybe had been an elderly fragile individual and there happened to be an influenza epidemic around our community. I wouldn’t put influenza on the death certificate, I’ve never been encouraged to do so. I would put, probably, respiratory arrest would be the top line and underlying cause for disease would be pneumonia and contributing factors I might well put in emphysema or congestive heart failure. But I would never put influenza down as the underlying cause of death, and yet that is what we’re being asked to do here.”

Normally, two doctors are needed to certify a death, one of whom has been treating the patient or who knows them and has seen them recently. That has changed. For Covid-19 only, the certification can be made by a single doctor, and there is no requirement for them to have examined, or even met, the patient. A video-link consultation in the four weeks prior to death is now felt to be sufficient for death to be attributed to Covid-19. For deaths in care homes the situation is even more extraordinary. Care home providers, most of whom are not medically trained, may make a statement to the effect that a patient has died of Covid-19. In the words of the Office for National Statistics, this ‘may or may not correspond to a medical diagnosis or test result, or be reflected in the death certification’. From 29 March the numbers of ‘Covid deaths’ have included all cases where Covid-19 was simply mentioned on the death certificate — irrespective of positive testing and whether or not it may have been incidental to, or directly responsible for, death. From 29 April the numbers include the care home cases simply considered likely to be Covid-19.”

Results
…Among people <70 years old, infection fatality rates ranged from 0.00% to 0.57% with median of 0.05% across the different locations (corrected median of 0.04%).

Dr. John P.A. Ioannidis, Epidemiologist (Standford University)

Death rate
Initial data show that the coronavirus is deadlier. In the U.S., seasonal flu kills 1 in a thousand people (0.1%) who get sick from it — the death toll last season was more than 34,000. Worldwide, an estimated 300,000 to 650,000 people die from flu each year.

By contrast, COVID-19 is currently estimated to kill at least 10 people per thousand infected (1%). “It’s about 10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Disease, in congressional testimony on March 11.”