Covid Death Toll in US Likely 16% Higher Than Official Tally, Study Says (theguardian.com) 311
The Guardian reports:
The Covid death toll in the U.S. is likely at least 16% higher than the official tally, according to a new study, and researchers believe the cause of the undercounting goes beyond overloaded health systems to a lack of awareness of Covid and low levels of testing.
The second year of the pandemic also had nearly as many uncounted excess deaths as the first, the study found.
More than 1.1 million Americans have died from Covid, according to official records. But the actual number is assuredly higher, given the high rates of excess deaths. Demographers wanted to know how many could be attributed to Covid, and they drilled down to data at the county level to discover patterns in geography and time. There were 1.2 million excess deaths from natural causes — excluding deaths from accidents, firearms, suicide and overdoses — between March 2020 and August 2022, the researchers estimated, and about 163,000 of those deaths were not attributed to Covid in any way — but most of them should have been, the researchers say... "The mortality that's not considered Covid starts a little bit before the Covid surges officially start and crests a little bit sooner," said Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, associate professor in the department of sociology and the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota and one of the study's authors. That indicates some people didn't realize their illness was Covid, due to a lack of awareness about its prevalence and low levels of testing. There was also a rise in out-of-hospital deaths — in homes and nursing homes, for instance — which makes ascertaining the cause of death more difficult...
"[W]e find over the first 30 months of the pandemic that serious gaps remained in surveillance," said Andrew Stokes, associate professor of global health and sociology at Boston University and one of the study's authors. "Even though we got a lot better at testing for Covid, we were still missing a lot of official Covid deaths" in the U.S., said Jennifer Dowd, professor of demography and population health at University of Oxford, who was not involved in this research. The phenomenon "underscores how badly the U.S. fared as the pandemic continued," Wrigley-Field said. "It does profoundly reflect failures in the public health system."
One of the study's authors told the Guardian that the hardest-hit areas were non-metropolitan counties, especially in the west and the south, with fewer resources for investigating deaths (and lower testing levels) — as well as different methodologies for assembling the official numbers.
The second year of the pandemic also had nearly as many uncounted excess deaths as the first, the study found.
More than 1.1 million Americans have died from Covid, according to official records. But the actual number is assuredly higher, given the high rates of excess deaths. Demographers wanted to know how many could be attributed to Covid, and they drilled down to data at the county level to discover patterns in geography and time. There were 1.2 million excess deaths from natural causes — excluding deaths from accidents, firearms, suicide and overdoses — between March 2020 and August 2022, the researchers estimated, and about 163,000 of those deaths were not attributed to Covid in any way — but most of them should have been, the researchers say... "The mortality that's not considered Covid starts a little bit before the Covid surges officially start and crests a little bit sooner," said Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, associate professor in the department of sociology and the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota and one of the study's authors. That indicates some people didn't realize their illness was Covid, due to a lack of awareness about its prevalence and low levels of testing. There was also a rise in out-of-hospital deaths — in homes and nursing homes, for instance — which makes ascertaining the cause of death more difficult...
"[W]e find over the first 30 months of the pandemic that serious gaps remained in surveillance," said Andrew Stokes, associate professor of global health and sociology at Boston University and one of the study's authors. "Even though we got a lot better at testing for Covid, we were still missing a lot of official Covid deaths" in the U.S., said Jennifer Dowd, professor of demography and population health at University of Oxford, who was not involved in this research. The phenomenon "underscores how badly the U.S. fared as the pandemic continued," Wrigley-Field said. "It does profoundly reflect failures in the public health system."
One of the study's authors told the Guardian that the hardest-hit areas were non-metropolitan counties, especially in the west and the south, with fewer resources for investigating deaths (and lower testing levels) — as well as different methodologies for assembling the official numbers.
Probably (Score:5, Interesting)
We know many coroners were asked [truthout.org] to alter [truthout.org] the cause of death [koaa.com] on death certificates so it didn't list covid. In some cases the coroner doesn't count covid deaths [columbiatribune.com].
While it is impossible to count every single covid death across the country, when the "official" cause is altered or outright not recorded, of course the death toll will be higher.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Whether it reads "covid" on the death certificate or not, if the conspiracy nutters don't want to claim that people were deliberately murdered, there isn't really a lot of wiggle room to explain the spike [census.gov] in the death statistics.
Re:Probably (Score:5, Interesting)
If the death certificate doesn't say covid is the cause of death then that death isn't recorded in the covid statistics. By altering the "official" cause of death to something non-covid, that undercounts the number of covid deaths. Which is somewhat what this study is suggesting. Total deaths were undercounted which means the true count is higher. That also tallies with your spike.
But then, what I'm saying is why I got downmodded. The nutters don't want to hear this, no matter how many of them died [businessinsider.com] from [nypost.com] covid [cnn.com] after saying it was just the flu [newsweek.com], or a hoax [imgur.com], they weren't [thedailybeast.com] getting [theguardian.com] vaccinated [businessinsider.com], and would use horse paste [twitter.com] to protect themselves [independent.co.uk].
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
While I don't disagree with the premise, a percentage of deaths was also linked to the lack of preventative care for manageable but critical illnesses associated with the shutdowns and hospital challenges. I am sure someone could look up historical trends with the number of people diagnosed with hypertension, diabetes, and cancers (among other things) to better correlate that if they wanted to...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
"No shit, but it's pretty obvious why this person died of blood loss NOW and not at some random other time."
Re: Probably (Score:4, Informative)
Dr. Sehault (coronory specialist on youtube) has a good video comparing the waves of excess deaths with the vaccination rates.
He shows conclusively that there is no correlation between excess deaths and vaccination.
He shows conclusively that the surges in excess deaths were correlated to the waves of infection.
Roughly 1 person per million had issues with vaccination (mostly young men with a lot of blood vessels in their deltoids) which could have been avoided by proper aspiration (stick the needle in- draw back and confirm no blood- then inject the vaccine).
Roughly 4,500 per million died from covid in red states per their own suspect numbers.
Roughly 2,500 per million died in most blue states (and those deaths are higher in "red" counties in those blue states).
23 of the 25 states with the highest death rates are red states. Those other two states were point of entry states on the east coast with high population densities who lost a lot of people before social distancing started and "proning" was discovered as a treatment option and way before vaccines became available.
Re:Probably (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know why this got downvoted. In my very-extended "friends group" several husbands died of "suffocation". My grandmother died of covid (otherwise healthy before she caught it) but the official cause was listed as heart failure or whatever.
The best way to look at the data is to look at "excess deaths" data, it was significantly above the norm in 2020-21-22 and a big portion of the delta between excess deaths and covid deaths those years, a large part of that is likely covid.
Re: (Score:2)
Of course the death rates were higher, Republicunts desperately trying to cover to Trumps gross incompetence is why the stats dont show it.
Excess deaths (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Not to discredit the lockdowns and how much they helped (Am a pharmaceutics bioengi, so I know the science behind it well enough), but I do wonder how many of these deaths happened, not because of covid, but because of everything else surrounding covid.
I know people who fucking burned their skin with excessive usage of bleach, people whose businesses got ruined due to covid, people who drank the fearporn koolaid by the gallon... And, to this day, online discussions have never recovered, with people flinging
Re: Excess deaths (Score:5, Interesting)
Which of the things you list there are lethal?
What I give you is that the increased deaths also include those that died because their operations couldn't happen in time because hospitals were overburdened with patients...
Re: (Score:2)
Actually the lockdowns mostly stopped that (Score:2, Troll)
That would have killed enough baby boomers to affect the election anyway so t
Re: Actually the lockdowns mostly stopped that (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know about your jurisdiction, but in mine, which had some of the most severe lockdown rules in place that I knew about, you were by no means required to stay indoors 24/7. Going for a walk, as long as you didn't do it with anyone not from your household, was certainly not forbidden.
Not that I'd think anyone who already didn't move a limb unless they had to would suddenly have become an avid power walker...
And, bluntly, you don't become a 400 pound lardball with a blood pressure pushing 200 within a
Re: (Score:2)
I know people who fucking burned their skin with excessive usage of bleach, people whose businesses got ruined due to covid, people who drank the fearporn koolaid by the gallon
It seems to me that other already-tracked metrics would catch these sorts of deaths, and if they were statistically significant it should be apparent - e.g. deaths from suicide, deaths related to alcoholism, etc. I don't know if there's an "death caused by abject stupidity" metric though, so maybe not everything would get caught...
Re: (Score:2)
Death by stupidity is either covered by accident or part of the increased mortality...
I Don't have the energy to look up the studies (Score:2)
The reason Lock downs were controversial is because we had a election going on and it was
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Not to discredit the lockdowns and how much they helped (Am a pharmaceutics bioengi, so I know the science behind it well enough)
Regarding that: https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/... [jhu.edu]
Johns Hopkins is a world-renowned research institution, and is the organization entrusted by the government to keep track of the COVID death toll. They were also considered by the media to be the ultimate authority on all matters COVID, that is until they released the report linked above, after which point every Tom, Dick, and Harry has been busy trying to discredit the entire institution.
Re: (Score:2)
My quality of life was great during the lockdowns. I learned to play guitar, started exercising regularly (outdoors!), procured and read a few books that I otherwise wouldn't have. No way would I trade those things for a few nights at the movies.
More importantly, at the time lockdowns were implemented, nobody had any of these statistics being cited. In the absence of information, caution is the right approach. If the mortality rate had turned out to be 50%, you'd be complaining the lockdowns weren't hard e
Re: (Score:3)
Best compare them to their neighbor, Norway, which did have extensive lockdowns, and a fraction of their COVID deaths.
Re: (Score:3)
Sure. But these are COVID deaths. As in "would not have happened without COVID" and hence part of the package when evaluating measure or their absence.
I wish people in the west were just more adult and not reduced to screaming tears by minor things like masks or vaccinations. Some asian countries with bad medical systems got very well through COVID, simply because people were sensible and willing to follow recommendations.
Re: Excess deaths (Score:4, Interesting)
but I do wonder how many of these deaths happened, not because of covid, but because of everything else surrounding covid.
It could be a negative number. In Australia in 2020, with covid-zero, we had 4% fewer deaths than normal. Due to preventative measures against Covid, there was a big drop in respiratory disease deaths, including influenza. 2020 was also a record low year for road deaths.
https://www.sydney.edu.au/news... [sydney.edu.au]
Re: Excess deaths (Score:5, Interesting)
Nobody is an "expert" on lockdowns today because we haven't had a pandemic like this in some odd 100 years so every playbook was theoretical.
What we do know throughout history is quarantining the sick when you have an outbreak of a contagious illness is a known effective and logical response.
That said the issue is how do you that in the modern world with a modern economy and people with far more freedom of movement then ever in history. And then try and do it in the United States where you have 50 different states with different rules, departments, politics and no way to enforce anything really. That's why despite all the "lockdowns" people in different towns and different states all had different experiences, there was little to no coordination and in that matter its true, they're not all that effective but we had the risk of overflowing hospitals so what were the alternatives? Just roll the dice?
Fact is the people who are against lockdowns should be crowing instead of complaining, they won, if another pandemic happens you won't see them again, not in most states. Not because of any medical effectiveness, no just because now the political cost is too high. It's no longer about science, it's a political issue and the people against it won that fight.
Re: (Score:3)
That's why despite all the "lockdowns" people in different towns and different states all had different experiences, there was little to no coordination and in that matter its true, they're not all that effective but we had the risk of overflowing hospitals so what were the alternatives?
In spite of all of that, the lockdowns actually worked really well. I think we've kind of forgotten what the original goal of telling everyone to stay home was... and it wasn't to stop COVID from spreading. Oh we hoped that would happen, a little, but the main goal was to flatten the curve. And it worked quite well!
Compare the experience most of the country had with the areas that got hit first, and in which the disease ran rampant before we began taking any countermeasures. NYC actually did experience
Re: (Score:3)
Probably about the same amount of deaths and a lot less dislocation. But someone thought there was a better way. There was no better way.
Look you can have your opinion about lockdowns and plenty of valid arguments against them but "same amount of deaths" is a big stretch because that isn't theoretical. We have the examples of countries that did much stronger coordinated lockdowns and they had far, far less deaths. I mean Japan had less total deaths than the state of Florida when it has like 4x the total population and much denser population centers. New Zealand, South Korea, etc.
Countries with coordinated lockdowns had better health outco
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
- suicide due to depression/lack of community/economic damage
- lack of medical care leading to mismanagement of chronic disease leading to early death
- vaccine injury
- lack of physical resources due to supply chain breaks leading to early death (anything from safety features not installed, to repairs delayed that ended in catastrophic and fatal failure)
- lack of physical exercise leading to increased chronic disease leading to early death
- violence and riots driven by social unrest exacerbated by lockdowns,
Re: (Score:3)
Promoters of lockdowns were sadly unwilling to look at costs, while exaggerating benefits massively.
No. You are just way overinflating the costs while ignoring the very real data of how excellent the lockdowns were. I mean you can look to the countries that implemented the strictest lockdowns. They not only had the lowest COVID deathtolls, but they also had the lowest excess mortality figures. Turns out that being at home and not going to the gym doesn't cause a spate of mass suicides like you people believe.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
False. The countries that did the best overall did not have lockdowns.
False. New Zealand had lockdowns and closed the border. Covid was eliminated within 3 months. Lockdowns ended, and things went back to normal for months.
During that period New Zealand had NEGATIVE excess deaths.
Show me a country without lockdowns that can beat that.
Re: (Score:2)
Think of this as evolution in action.
The Anti-Vaxxers will never forgive the vaccinated to have survived, and the Vaxxers will never forgive the unvaccinated to have survived, and both groups will be disappointed to find that there will not be any measurable effect on evolution coming from any of this. Apart of course from their mutual hatred, that is destined to be passed on for generations to come.
Re: Excess deaths (Score:2)
Re: Excess deaths (Score:2)
As opposed to many of the unvaxxed who only got COVID once and died the first time.
The vaccine does reduce the risk of death quite a bit.
Re: Excess deaths (Score:2)
Re: Excess deaths (Score:2)
Sorry about your friend. The plural of anecdote is not data, though.
Re: Excess deaths (Score:3)
This is false.
https://www.businessinsider.com/young-americans-dying-historic-numbers-covid-19-2021-1?op=1
Re: Excess deaths (Score:3)
It wasn't a blog post.
Nowhere does your link state that young people were not at risk for COVID. They were, and many died.
Re: (Score:3)
https://www.mayoclinic.org/dis... [mayoclinic.org]
https://www.ahajournals.org/do... [ahajournals.org]
Re: (Score:3)
Off course, but now the CDC is admitting it happening due to the vaccines:
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/c... [cdc.gov]
I'll take "Things That The Linked Article Doesn't Say" for $100 Alex.
Re: (Score:3)
First line: evidence from multiple vaccine safety monitoring systems in the United States and around the globe supports a causal association between mRNA COVID-19 vaccines
I'll take morons that can't read for $1000.
And before that it says "Cases of myocarditis and pericarditis have rarely been observed after COVID-19 vaccination in the United States"
I'll take butthurt idiots who have to misquote to make a point for $1000000.
But here's the kicker:
The severity of myocarditis and pericarditis cases can vary; most patients with myocarditis after mRNA COVID-19 vaccination have experienced resolution of symptoms by hospital discharge. CDC has published studies with clinical information about myocarditis and pericarditis after COVID-19 vaccination.
IOW even those rare cases were mostly completely fine after some time in hospital. Including cases like the "dead" Damar Hamlin.
And then, two links from this page we find https://journals.asm.org/doi/1... [asm.org] - which counts up all known cases, showing that it is very rare and m
Re: (Score:2)
It's going to be a hell of a lot higher than that (Score:4, Insightful)
We've got antiviral drugs that keep people alive but they're not getting out of that unscathed. They have permanent lung and heart damage.
That bad day in your mid-50s is now a stroke. That stroke when you're 60 is now a heart attack. And that heart attack when you're 65 puts you in the grave.
All of that before we take into account the millions of people who have what we're calling long covid.
We are just now starting to look at the long-term effects of letting the pandemic get is out of hand as we did. We need to stop putting incompetent fools in charge of everything and ignoring the advice of experts. I'll remind everyone that we were repeatedly warned by epidemiologists that this was coming
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It would be well worth throwing many, many billions at curing long COVID. I must declare an interest, but now that so many people have it, the economic justification for a moon shot is there.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Have there been any since the 60s? The actual moon shot, supersonic passenger aircraft... Anything later than those?
Re: (Score:2)
I fear those "incompetent fools" are a major part of the voter population.
Re: (Score:2)
Wokeness now ruins your pickup?
That sounds like something I'd need to hear. Gather 'round, kids, gramps took to the moonshine and is gonna tell us a story!
Lots of conjecture (Score:2, Insightful)
"excess deaths reported to non-COVID-19 natural causes may represent unrecognized COVID-19 deaths, deaths caused by pandemic health care interruptions, and/or deaths from the pandemic’s socioeconomic impacts"
The deaths may be from Covid, or may be from stuff loosely related to Covid happening or reaction to it, or may have nothing at all to do with it.
Your guess is as good as ours
Re:Lots of conjecture (Score:5, Insightful)
Was there something else going on in 2020 that lets annual deaths jump from about 2.8 millions in 2019 to 3.4 in 2020?
Re: (Score:2)
Whether it accounted for all the excess deaths or not, just saying “must be
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
it forced people into doing their opioids in isolation without oversight
Because otherwise, junkies generally push in the middle of town square and people really care a lot if some druggy is lying motionlessly in a ditch?
Re:Lots of conjecture (Score:4, Insightful)
If that caused a death spike of 25%, the US is more fucked up than even I thought.
Re: (Score:3)
A few hundreds? Maybe. Over half a million per year?
For real?
Re: (Score:2)
That explains why the death rates plateaued in 21 and didn't keep rising like mad, but what caused the sudden spike of 2020?
Re: (Score:2)
What we heard during the pandemic was that Covid deaths were being overreported, probably because hospitals were getting government reimbursement for Covid cases. Every death that occurred was attributed to Covid if the victim sneezed before dying, no matter what additional factors were in play. Now people are saying that the Covid death count is too low. How do we decide what to believe?
Re: (Score:2)
THis is not a "guess". It is called "Science". Maybe you should look it up.
Re: (Score:2)
If you could kindly point out how any of these things could potentially cause a 20-25% increase in mortality, I'd be delighted to hear it.
I need some new conspiracy nuttery, the old crap gets kinda stale. C'mon, entertain me!
And denial contributed also to low counts (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the study's authors told the Guardian that the hardest-hit areas were non-metropolitan counties, especially in the west and the south, with fewer resources for investigating deaths (and lower testing levels) — as well as different methodologies for assembling the official numbers.
There were also people who just refused to acknowledge loved ones had died of covid, and actively tried to block death certificates from listing covid. This is discussed in for example this article . In many cases, the official records simply used whatever family members said was the cause. Some were even more extreme. From that article:
In Cape Girardeau County, Missouri, coroner Wavis Jordan said his office “doesn’t do COVID deaths.” Jordan does not investigate deaths himself. He requires families to provide proof of a positive coronavirus test before including it on a death certificate. In 2021, he hasn’t pronounced a single person dead from COVID-19 in the 80,000-person county.
While part of this is due to lack of resources, and both TFA and the above linked piece discuss some of that, part of this is political in nature, with one end of the US right-wing deciding that covid wasn't a major issue and thus downplaying covid deaths. Unfortunately, downplaying a disease for political reasons doesn't make it less deadly.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
When the dust settles, and it did by now, what's left is the fact that there are more people dying every year since 2020 than until 2020. There simply isn't any other way to explain this anymore. Not even any war the US fought in the past 100 years caused such a noticeable jump in death numbers.
Covid ... (Score:5, Interesting)
The entire US national debate about Covid, whether vaccines are supposedly useless and dangerous, whether basic common sense measures to spread infectious disease are an assault on the constitutional rights of US citizens, etc, etc, ad nauseam, ... that has dominated US public discourse and news cycles for years can now be summed up like this:
- Florida has a population of 21,78 million people they are now counting 94,037 Covid deaths.
- Japan has a population of 125,7 million people they are now counting 74,694 Covid deaths.
If Florida's government had displayed the same level of basic common sense and competence when dealing with the Covid pandemic as Japan's government did then Florida's Covid death toll would be just under 13,000 and this is just one US state we're talking about here that has a higher death toll than a country six times it's size. These numbers say all that needs to be said.
Re:Covid ... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Lemme get this straight, a high population density is decreasing transmission rates, that's your argument?
Re: (Score:3)
Oh, that was a joke. Ok.
You shouldn't do that. Poe's Law [wikipedia.org] applies fully to anything anyone says about Covid.
Re:Covid ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Congrats. You made literally the dumbest post here.
Ouch. I'd feel pretty bad about that one, except thankfully you've taken the crown from me in the very same reply by taking a post about SUVs driving a virus around seriously.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
And of course the people of Japan are identical to the people of Florida in every way, with absolutely no difference in rates of obesity or other factors that make covid more serious, so it is perfectly normal and valid to just compare them per capita like this.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
We generally limit skydiving to areas where a failed dive isn't going to result in you falling on someone. We usually don't allow people to drive off-road except on private property where permission has been given.
With COVID, you can go anywhere and infect anyone, and they can't avoid you as you pass them in the grocery store or wherever else people have to go frequently. I'd say that's how the line is drawn - how potentially dangerous you are and how reasonable it is to expect others to avoid you.
I think
does that also correspond to a 16% drop of (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
They who?
By lying, how does anyone benefit?
Just what is the truth in your opinion?
Re: (Score:2)
They who?
Maybe he was talking about Rachel Levine so he used "they"?
Re: (Score:2)
Ok, then what exactly killed those people? Foot fungus?
Re: (Score:2)
This is called "statistics". If done right (and here it is) it allows analysis in the absence of direct data. These people are not "pushing" anything, they are analysing data. You know, like you do when you actually want to know things about reality.
Re: (Score:2)
So what killed these people? That they're dead is hard to deny, so what killed them?
Re: (Score:2)
A new breed of particularly stupid circlejerkers who assume everyone would believe their nonsense or even know what they're talking about. Almost self-aware enough to know that they'll be made fun of for openly being so stupid, but still can't stop themselves.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
True - it's full of anecdotal information and coincidences. Still, it's used as a place to get an idea of where to start looking for potential issues.
In any large building, the fire alarm will have an annunciator panel including information on where the fire is, though probably not down to the exact room.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Probably you're the one who needs a booster. You can't decide to ban ambulances for safety because you have a list of times ambulances made things worse ( eg crash or bumpiness) -- that's just half the equation, it only tells you where to look for improvements in ambulance safety not whether you should refuse to ever use one. Same thing with vaccines.
>> VAERS is a passive reporting system, meaning it relies on individuals to send in reports of their experiences
And yeah, how it works means that now sud
Re: (Score:2)
Well, if this was the case, we'd see a spike with the vaccinated people who die from the side effects.
Well... nope [images.jifo.co].
Got any other ideas?
Re: (Score:2)
I assume you still trust Google and are blinded by its bias (you should know better by now.) Try yandex:
Putin agrees, Yandex is better.
Re:Big pharma lying about the vaccine side effects (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, he doesn't know geography, he clearly cannot have a clue about biology. After all, everyone knows, geography is a requirement to even begin understanding biology...
Re: (Score:3)
That indicates it was also a failure of the health care industry.
You have identified the problem (emphasis mine)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
>Hold on a minute. Who said masks didn't work first?... Fauci wasn't Trump's guy, not in the least.
You certainly bought the Fox News line on that one. Fauci was frequently quoted out of context, had completely fabricated statements attributed to him, and had actual statements quoted as if they were current long after the available information on COVID had changed. He was always giving the best advice possible at the time he gave it. And when he was telling people not to hoard masks, that was because t
Re: (Score:2)
but respirators did keep people alive during the early waves of more virulent infection and before vaccination was available.
I am not aware of any actual evidence for that. That was certainly the intent of using them. But my impression was that the use of respirators eventually became a last resort and mostly people didn't recover once put on a respirator. I also understood their heavy use early on may have done more harm than good. As I said, and was demonstrated in the responses, getting anything like an objective evaluation of that is not very likely.
Re: (Score:2)
Who said masks didn't work first?
I dunno. What Fauci said in the beginning was that there isn't enough evidence yet to say that masks are a good idea so people were asked not to hoard them because there weren't enough of them and hospitals could run into shortages when people hoovered them up left and right like they did with toilet paper when there wasn't conclusive evidence yet that they're even useful. That was at this point a sensible advice. When you don't know whether masks work against a certain danger (covid) but you know that they
Re: (Score:2)
What Fauci said in the beginning was that there isn't enough evidence yet to say that masks are a good idea
The message was not that there was not "enough evidence". The message was that there was evidence that wearing a mask would do more harm than good and their conclusion was that you shouldn't wear one. Whether Fauci personally said it, that message from the CDC was repeated by all sorts of public health officials.
Re: (Score:2)
After a quite thorough search of articles from 2020, what I found was, aside of a lot of conspiracy nuttery, that the CDC advised against using masks with valves and that there's a potential harm in wearing a mask improperly, mostly due to CO2 buildup. The only article that at least mentioned that health organizations used to recommend not wearing masks is from April 2020 [npr.org], where they state that this recommendation was reversed in the light of new information, and that people are advised to fashion cloth mas
Re: (Score:2)
NPR [npr.org]
Old advice:
U.S. health authorities had discouraged healthy Americans from wearing facial coverings for weeks, saying they were likely to do more harm than good in the fight against the coronavirus — but now, as researchers have learned more about how the highly contagious virus spreads, officials have changed their recommendations...The CDC had based this recommendation on the fact that such coverings offer little protection for wearers, and the need to conserve the country's alarmingly sparse supplies of personal protective equipment.
This was reported as their new advice:
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now recommends that people wear cloth or fabric face coverings, which can be made at home, when entering public spaces such as grocery stores and public transit stations.
Let me suggest that the new advice is little better than the older advice. Homemade cloth face coverings were never really effective either.
The point is that none of this was "science". They were trying to protect the supplies of masks for hospitals. So they made stuff up. Disinformation in support of a worthy goal.
The other issue is that if the masks had gotten into nursing homes instead of hospitals we might have had a lot fewer deaths. But the
Re: We need a real investigation (Score:2)
You forgot prisons. Tbey also didn't get masks.
Re: (Score:2)
The numbers have been shooting up since 2020, what's your point?
Re: Especially... (Score:2)
Technically they couldn't breath, so they couldn't contact COVID.