US COVID-19: The Big Picture, through May 31, 2022

Vaccines have done nothing to stop the spread and little to reduce deaths in any significant way.

Over the last eleven years 2010-2020, heart disease in the United States has killed 1729 people per day on average.

Cancer comes in a close second at 1620 per day.

COVID-19 remains the third leading cause of death, averaging 1221 deaths per day to date, 822 days after the first death on February 29, 2020. 

The best explanation of the data so far remains that the virus has evolved to spread more easily at the expense of lethality, otherwise the explosion in cases in 2022 would have resulted in far many more deaths than we have at present. Deaths per day in the third year of the pandemic remain relatively constant when measured over time.

And who is most victimized?

California, America's largest state by population, continues to show that COVID-19 infects people 65 and over the least, but kills them the most by far. Since May 2021, deaths among people 65 and over in California have changed little, constituting 74% of deaths then and 71% a year later.

This is despite the fact that people 65 and older became the most vaccinated segment of the US population in 2021.

CDC reports that today 95% of them nationally have received at least one dose, 91.2% are fully vaccinated, 69.7% are boosted once, and 29.7% are boosted twice. In California to date nearly 85% of people 65+ have been fully vaccinated with nearly 76% of those boosted.

There needs to be a massive shift in the messaging of the medical establishment away from thinking the vaccines are a panacea for anybody, toward preventing senior deaths by reducing their comorbidities and quickly treating them with drugs like Paxlovid when they become infected with coronavirus: 

In reducing mortality, Arbel said the treatment showed a very high benefit in patients 65 and older - an 81% risk reduction. There were no observed benefits in younger adults, who are at less risk of dying from COVID.

 

CBS eyeball news can't even get the basics right for "excess deaths" story

 The eyeball news story gets it wrong by screwing up the time frame. The reporter is just lazy:

Two years after the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a global pandemic, new research suggests around 18.2 million people have died worldwide as a result. That toll is more than three times higher than the WHO's tally of nearly 6 million officially reported COVID-19 deaths through the end of 2021.

The new figures, published Thursday in The Lancet, are based on the number of "excess deaths" in countries around the world. Researchers determined how many additional deaths occurred from January 1, 2020 through December 31, 2021 by modeling the number of "expected" deaths in years unaffected by a global pandemic, compared to the total number who actually died from any cause. 

You can't use "the current total".  This is March, hello. You have to use the total on 12/31/21 as the study did, which was closer to 825,000. That means C19 deaths in the US might have been as much as 37% higher than actually reported, not 18%.

The disparity between excess deaths and C19 deaths for the US is much larger than the story lets on.

Similarly with the global total figures. There were about 5.46 million deaths globally due to COVID-19 on 12/31/21, not "nearly 6 million", so the excess deaths are about 3.33 times greater than the C19 deaths, not simply 3.03 times greater.

Perhaps the most significant new piece of information from the story is that "deaths from heart attacks and stroke have climbed beyond pre-pandemic levels", but the story won't suggest that there might be an association between those deaths and mass vaccination, only with the disease itself.

How many older people have died of heart attack and stroke after vaccination without contracting COVID-19? There must be many, many millions globally, by definition, but no one is publishing this information.

The bias in favor of the safety of the vaccines will not hold up forever as new evidence like this emerges.

We were confidently told these vaccines would stop the spread, even at the 50% threshold, which turned out to be a huge lie. Even after Provincetown the authorities bent over backwards to stick with the narrative.

Then we were told the vaccines would stop serious outcomes, yet US deaths in January and February 2022 are the fifth and fourth worst months for deaths of the entire pandemic.

The time for the end of this farce is long past. 

US COVID-19 Summary for 2020 plus Jan 2021 death projection

Cumulative cases 20.026m

Cumulative deaths 0.346m

case fatality rate 1.73%

(us-covid-tracker.com, data subject to revision)

Cumulative hospitalizations 686,158

Cumulative deaths 336,779

percent dead 49.1% (not all deaths were hospitalized, obviously)

Peak Saturday for hospitalizations was 12/26 with 117,344

(covidtracking.com, data values last revised 1/2/21 and also subject to change)

Worst months for deaths:

Dec 78,016 (2,516/day)

Apr 58,836 (1,961/day)

May 41,239 (1,330/day)

Nov 37,513 (1,250/day)

Aug 29,610 (955/day)

(us-covid-tracker.com)

Nov cases 4.406m

Dec deaths 78,016

cfr 1.77%

Dec cases 6.4111m

Projected new deaths for Jan 2021 at 1.7%: 108,988

The compound daily growth rate for US COVID-19 deaths bottomed on July 4th

Apart from the first week from the first death in the New York Times data at us-covid-tracker.com, Feb 29-Mar 7, the peak rate was achieved on Sat Mar 28 at 30.3%. The compound daily growth rate had dropped to just 3.2% by May 2.

This chart shows rates only after falling below 1% in order to show the current scale and the clear bottoming on Jul 4.

Projecting US deaths from COVID-19 to Nov 19, 2020 using optimistic assumptions

Daily US deaths from COVID-19 fell from 27,279 on 4/20 to 20,951 on 5/19, or 23.2% under circumstances of stay-at-home orders in many US states.

The following projection assumes, incorrectly but optimistically, that those orders would remain in place indefinitely, or at least the behaviors from them, and that case growth would continue to fall monthly at the same rate. 

Opening up the country as we are about to will eventually stop the decline trend and increase case counts and therefore death totals, but that's a problem for another day.

Assume that by 6/19 cases per day would fall to 16,090

by 7/19 to 12,357

by 8/19 to 9,490

by 9/19 to 7,288

by 10/19 to 5,597

Assume a simple average daily case addition per period of 18,520.5

14.223.5

10,923.5

8,389

6,442.5

each @30 days

Total cases added by 11/19: 1,754,970 @ 6% case fatality rate =  +105,298 deaths

plus 1.09 million existing cases @ 6% case fatality rate = +65,400 deaths

plus already existing deaths per Johns Hopkins = +92,149 deaths

Total deaths actual and baked in the cake by 11/19 = 262,847

Lots of variables could change the outcome, including improved treatment techniques in ICUs, ramped up use of new drugs like remdesivir, earlier diagnosis of patients through testing, earlier quarantining of the infected, stepped up contact tracing, more mask wearing in public, more social distancing, etc. The country seems quite divided about some of these, however, and many might throw caution to the wind while others do not. Much will depend on the character of local communities. In 1918 St. Louis turned out much differently than Philadelphia.

So as of right now, all things being equal, the much ridiculed original IHME estimate of 240,000 deaths looks more and more plausible with each passing day, even if the "by when" date isn't early August anymore.