Covid question

[rogue06]

The town I live in has one traffic light. There were about 7,250 residents according to the last census. There are 6 or 8 churches within 2 miles of my house. My church is about 14 miles away.

Back in the 60s we stopped off in my mother's home town. A place where her nearest neighbor lived a quarter of a mile away and her graduating class in High School had all of 7 girls in it (they called themselves the "Mighty Seven").

They had just installed their first stop sign in town.

[Teallaura]

Found it - finally. NIH instead of CDC. This was fairly early.

[Stoic]

Found it - finally. NIH instead of CDC. This was fairly early.

That link shows that one infected person who never had symptoms did not infect anyone else, even though there were many opportunities.

Even if you extrapolate from that to conclude that any infected person who never has symptoms can't infect someone else, it tells you nothing about the likelihood of an infected person who does eventually have symptoms passing on the infection to someone else before he has symptoms.

There are a multitude of other studies that show that people can infect others before their symptoms show up. So the fact that you don't have symptoms right now does not mean that you can't infect others.

[eider]

I've known cases of Covid. There have been a few in my family as well in the church that I attend.

Ah..... Yes.... I misread your earlier post.
The difference between our communities does seem to be that this one here has embraced Covid rules and vaccinations. The lot.
We have a Conservative Government but a recent bye-election in a Labour stronghold swung sharply to the right and elected s conservative MP .... so Boris Johnson's tough rules about Covid don't seem to have done him too much political harm.
We've got the Indian variant spreading here now. I don't think this is going to end anytime soon.

[JimboJSR]

I'm not so sure that it's really any different than people dying from other flus over the years.

Then how do you square this with hospitals around the world being crammed full of people dying from covid in a manner that none of us have seen before, despite working through many, many flu seasons?

and i'm thinking, if it's this easy to report a death as covid, just how many out there are being reported falsely?

I can't speak for the USA, but in the UK death reporting is taken very seriously indeed. Whilst death certs have to be filled out on the balance of probabilities, we have a legal duty to do this to the best of our ability. We also get contacted intermittently by a death certification review board, who select death certs at random and go through the clinical history and test results with us to ensure that what we have put as cause of death is reasonable (I got a call from them today, funily enough). And please remember that, as doctors, diagnosing people is what we do for a living every hour of every day. We're generally quite good at it, and work hard to ensure we get it right. We also have no political or financial incentive to lie on a death cert - quite the opposite, we have a legal duty to be honest. If I were found to have completed a cert in a misleading manner, I could lose my job.

I can only report what I feel, what I see. I would not be surprised, nor would it induce any cognitive dissonance. Now what does that say about my map of reality? What does it say about who I am, my honesty, my integrity?

It shows you're relying on your feelings and a VERY limited window of the planet's evidence to decide on the truth. Not a good idea.

I say again: Thomas denied the Lord's rising based on how he felt and what he saw. What he should have done was listened to the consistent, overwhelming testimony of those whom he knew to be reliable, and had no good reason to doubt.

You think Mike Whitney's thoughts are quackery? You really think so?

Pretty much, I'm afraid. Or a sprinkling of truth but used in a useless or misleading way.

I am still reading through the evidence that Stoic provided, but to be honest, it's difficult for me. It's very tedious and awful boring. Many of the supporting abstracts are missing, or I can't access them etc. It's like a labyrinth of minutia and I do not have the academic discipline (as well as attention span) to efficiently navigate this information.

As an academic myself, I sympathise

So I guess you have to trust who is more likely to be closer to the truth. Either me - a medical doctor who has a scientific background in the immune system, and who has seen the effects of the pandemic first hand, and comunicated with my colleagues around the world - or mikewhitney, who has done none of these things, and seems to really want the pandemic to be overblown as it fits with his preconceived ideas about world government and media, and means he doesn't have to be scared or to inconvenience himself to protect himself and others. Have a think.

[rogue06]

I can't speak for the USA, but in the UK death reporting is taken very seriously indeed. Whilst death certs have to be filled out on the balance of probabilities, we have a legal duty to do this to the best of our ability. We also get contacted intermittently by a death certification review board, who select death certs at random and go through the clinical history and test results with us to ensure that what we have put as cause of death is reasonable (I got a call from them today, funily enough). And please remember that, as doctors, diagnosing people is what we do for a living every hour of every day. We're generally quite good at it, and work hard to ensure we get it right. We also have no political or financial incentive to lie on a death cert - quite the opposite, we have a legal duty to be honest. If I were found to have completed a cert in a misleading manner, I could lose my job.

Currently the U.S. has incentivized diagnoses of the Chicom coronavirus. Hospitals get an extra 20% "reimbursement" for COVID-19 Medicare patients if they are listed as having it with a number of states permitting just the suspicion that someone had it being sufficient -- no lab tests or other verification needed^[1]. And recently FEMA started passing out $700 checks to the families of citizens said to have died from it^[2].

So there is a financial incentive to pad both the number of patients treated as well as the mortality rate.




1. For instance, California, list only laboratory-confirmed diagnoses but others, such as New York, list all presumed cases.

2. We even have a Congresswoman who is telling illegal immigrants how to unlawfully file for this

[JimboJSR]

Currently the U.S. has incentivized diagnoses of the Chicom coronavirus. Hospitals get an extra 20% "reimbursement" for COVID-19 Medicare patients if they are listed as having it with a number of states permitting just the suspicion that someone had it being sufficient -- no lab tests or other verification needed^[1]

That's certainly not the case in the UK, or any other health system I know of. But then again, you don't ned to convince me that the US health system is a catastrophe...

That said - a lot hangs on your words "suspicion" or "presumed". A doctor's "suspicion" could mean a modest possibility from one of several differential diagnoses - not a robust way of counting infections or deaths. It could also mean a diagnosis which cannot be proven, but is highly likely - this would be the caswe with a lotof covid cases in the first wave which were clinically exactly what we'd expect from covid, but where testing capacity wasn't yet up to scratch so no PCR was available for the patient.

UK death certificates are a good example of this. We have to complete them on the balance of probabilities, rather than proof, but we do also have a legal duty to do this responsibly and carefully, and as I said we get checked up on this quite regularly, so it's not like we whip a random diagnosis out our butts without any thought or professionalism. So when it comes to the appropriateness or otherwise of NYC etc, the devil is in the detail. The rules may be very loose, therefore allowing unscupulous docs to manipuate the financial system - or it may be far more robust than you're supposing.

[mikewhitney]

Then how do you square this with hospitals around the world being crammed full of people dying from covid in a manner that none of us have seen before, despite working through many, many flu seasons?


I can't speak for the USA, but in the UK death reporting is taken very seriously indeed. Whilst death certs have to be filled out on the balance of probabilities, we have a legal duty to do this to the best of our ability. We also get contacted intermittently by a death certification review board, who select death certs at random and go through the clinical history and test results with us to ensure that what we have put as cause of death is reasonable (I got a call from them today, funily enough). And please remember that, as doctors, diagnosing people is what we do for a living every hour of every day. We're generally quite good at it, and work hard to ensure we get it right. We also have no political or financial incentive to lie on a death cert - quite the opposite, we have a legal duty to be honest. If I were found to have completed a cert in a misleading manner, I could lose my job.

I do agree with Jimbo that there appears to be an unusual illness that has been observed by doctors in many places. One doctor notes that we are seeing a blood disease rather than a disease of the lungs. We saw early on that a doctor had identified the ineffectiveness of ventilators on patients that had the severe covid-19. We now know that the effective treatments primarily address problems in the blood -- hope I represented that correctly.

I appreciate Jimbo's honest approach and hope that such honesty is propagated throughout the profession.

It shows you're relying on your feelings and a VERY limited window of the planet's evidence to decide on the truth. Not a good idea.

It is funny that Jimbo makes this argument while disregarding the evidence of 1000s of doctors across the world.

As an academic myself, I sympathise

So I guess you have to trust who is more likely to be closer to the truth. Either me - a medical doctor who has a scientific background in the immune system, and who has seen the effects of the pandemic first hand, and comunicated with my colleagues around the world - or mikewhitney, who has done none of these things, and seems to really want the pandemic to be overblown as it fits with his preconceived ideas about world government and media, and means he doesn't have to be scared or to inconvenience himself to protect himself and others. Have a think.

It is not a surprise that a professional medical doctor would esteem his own knowledge as superior to all other doctors. It is silly his fixation on mikewhitney and disregard of much of what other doctors have found. I have not discounted his experience. And I'm glad he has shared a bit more detail of his experience --maybe without yet sharing the treatments -- and whether he trusts the studies on Ivermectin and HCQ or maybe he is a denier of the science.
Jimbo fails to recognize that my goal in sharing the effective treatments is not to kill people but to protect myself and others. His job is to repair people who have not been able to take sufficient safeguards against the illness.

[rogue06]

That's certainly not the case in the UK, or any other health system I know of. But then again, you don't ned to convince me that the US health system is a catastrophe...

That said - a lot hangs on your words "suspicion" or "presumed". A doctor's "suspicion" could mean a modest possibility from one of several differential diagnoses - not a robust way of counting infections or deaths. It could also mean a diagnosis which cannot be proven, but is highly likely - this would be the caswe with a lotof covid cases in the first wave which were clinically exactly what we'd expect from covid, but where testing capacity wasn't yet up to scratch so no PCR was available for the patient.

UK death certificates are a good example of this. We have to complete them on the balance of probabilities, rather than proof, but we do also have a legal duty to do this responsibly and carefully, and as I said we get checked up on this quite regularly, so it's not like we whip a random diagnosis out our butts without any thought or professionalism. So when it comes to the appropriateness or otherwise of NYC etc, the devil is in the detail. The rules may be very loose, therefore allowing unscupulous docs to manipuate the financial system - or it may be far more robust than you're supposing.

In some areas of the U.S. we tend to list any possible causes or conditions that may have played a contributory role in a person’s death, FWIU many other nations list the primary cause or causes. For instance, if someone had cancer and got shot a doctor could list cancer as one of the causes especially if he figured that it might have caused the person to be in a weaker condition making it more likely to not survive being shot. Some times it's much more strained.

Back in the early '80s when tests for detecting the presence of marijuana in the system were first developed we experienced a sharp increase in official marijuana-related deaths. This was used by opponents of decriminalization as evidence that marijuana was more dangerous than previously thought. But then someone started examining the records and discovered that a substantial number of these were instances of passengers in auto wrecks that had the drug in the system meaning that it played absolutely no role in the death (also keep in mind the tests could detect it several weeks after use). Similarly with the Chicom coronavirus, someone can have a very mild case and die of an accident and have it listed as one of the causes. Or even a severe case and die of an accident that nobody could have survived.

[JimboJSR]

Similarly with the Chicom coronavirus, someone can have a very mild case and die of an accident and have it listed as one of the causes. Or even a severe case and die of an accident that nobody could have survived.

Evidence of this happening on a significant scale?

[Stoic]

Similarly with the Chicom coronavirus, someone can have a very mild case and die of an accident and have it listed as one of the causes. Or even a severe case and die of an accident that nobody could have survived.

Only if the doctor is incompetent, or the doctor and the hospital administrators are corrupt.