Sep 6, 2022·edited Sep 6, 2022Liked by Jessica Hockett
This was my first clue something was amiss, found the all cause mortality data from the CDC[1] and realized weeks 1-11 in NYC were completely normal (average 1139 deaths compared to 1126 deaths the previous year with no notable deviation) and then suddenly jumped to record 1405 deaths (end of 3/21), then 2805 (3/28), before peaking at 6293 and 7862 deaths (4/4, 4/11, respectively) before receding back to baseline average of 305 deaths/week for the remainder of 2020.
If the virus was spreading through the population between Nov 2019-mid March 2020 as we soon realized, and, it was as devastatingly lethal and contagious as predicted, you would expect an ever increasing all cause mortality trend throughout late 2019 and early 2020. Yet there was nothing.
Not a single indication deaths were on the rise.
The virus, which apparently a single super spreader could infect an entire wedding party of 300, somehow lurked in the background amongst a population of 11,000,000 packed in at 30,000-70,000 people per square mile, not triggering a strain on hospitals or morgues in the 5 months prior the lockdowns.
It just happened to wait until we enacted unprecedented disruptions to society and medical care to emerge.
Sure. Makes complete sense.
Never mind that coincidentally, heart attacks also increased nearly 5 fold immediately following the lockdowns. Complete coincidence... in fact, those heart attacks must have been Long Covid deaths!
This is exactly right, and is another dataset I was discussing with some data friends this weekend. I’ll aim to post the graphs this week, so that more people can see what we mean.
I was offered a promotion in NYC back in 2007, and sensing my hesitation my employer lined up an interview at St Johns in Rockaway for my girlfriend who was in her surgical residency so she could continue without setback.
I wound up accompanying her for the tour/pitch, and was taken aback at just how...overrun? crowded? ...I'm not finding the right words here.. I was simply awed at immensely busy the hospital seemed compared to what I was used to.
She was currently rotating through the various Cleveland Clinic hospitals at the time which I was familiar with, but this was something completely different. For the first time I was seeing hospitals running at the frantic pace I only thought existed in TV.
As we walked the hospital and listened to the program director's sales pitch, I saw halls lined with patients, gurneys everywhere, beds filled, and tried to tune out the constant blare of urgent announcements over the loudspeakers. It was surreal, at least to me.
She wasn't fazed much.
I wound up passing on that position for something else, but that experience always stuck with me.
13 years later, learning that hospitals like St Johns would abruptly alter their care model, halting intake of non-covid patients, redirecting patients to alternate care sites or outright discouraging them to seek medical attention out of fear they would get Covid, the engineer in me wondered what that disruption would do? Where would all the potential heart attacks and strokes go? [1] Could this disruption create more collateral damage than it offset? Could the cure possibly be worse than the disease?
22% of the increase in U.S. mortality for April 2020 (vs April 2019) was NYC, and 22% of covid-attributed deaths in the U.S. in April 2020 were in NYC.
Vs. NYC being 3% of the U.S. population. And I believe the Northeast--Pennsylvania and states north and east of PA--was a majority of covid-attributed deaths in the U.S. in April 2020.
Michael, I with you 100 percent. The key is that "early spread" did happen - and the IFR was microscopic. So any deaths (there were no doubt some) were "missed." And then deaths explode in a matter of weeks? After the lockdowns.
I hope you will visit my Substack. I've written several pieces documenting the evidence of early spread.
I understand why you call it "early spread" - i.e., earlier than the U.S. government's current official stance about virus "arrival". I also understand why some line of inquiry are framed as "lab leak versus natural emergence."
I prefer to think of the bigger question in terms of "circulation." When did SARS-CoV-2 (or iterations thereof) begin to circulate in the United Staes?
I think we'd get a lot closer to answers if we started with the *null hypothesis*, so to speak. Let's assume that NO excess death has been caused by covid. Where would that lead us?
That's a good point. I'll start to use virus "circulatio"n more in my future writings.
But the circulation was "spreading" from person to person, town-to-town, state-to-state and country-to-country. This contagious virus wasn't "isolated" to a few people or towns. Once it was was circulating, it was spreading.
I don't know. enough about viral dynamics to say whether respiratory viruses travel and replicate like a swarm of bees, which is what "spread" makes me think of. :)
Great sleuthing but help me understand the argument. Couldn't someone this view this as consistent with the mainstream narrative: the NY lockdowns were timed just at the inflection point when "exponential growth" started to take off. i.e. NY locked down because we saw a small number of cases multiplying and then exponential growth did its thing to create the shape you see. I'm not saying I believe this, I'm trying to understand the counter-argument.
Does seeing a problem with this data rely on believing that covid was in fact circulating widely in the US before March 2020? I believe it was for all the well-established reasons (Michael Senger lists some today) but I'm not sure how widely accepted that is yet?
Yes, they do view this as consistent with the mainstream narrative, because it is a simpler explanation and requires little critical thinking by the public. Similar to how selling "the terrorists hate our freedom" was a simple way to market the War on Terror 20 years ago, rather than dissecting the geo-politics of the middle east, assessing the impact of support for Israel, re-thinking the backing of Saudi empire against Iran, and a hundred other considerations which are beyond the attention span of the average person. "Hate our freedoms" was simple and made sense.
So, too, we are stuck with having to explain a very complex chain of interconnected events, analyzing hundreds of data sets, when the Covidians merely get to make up stories as needed which can't be falsified to fit weave their narrative against the events of the last 2 years.
Consider you don't even need Michael Senger's argument, all you need was the May 24th edition of The New York times which ran the headline "US DEATHS NEAR 100,000, AN INCALCULABLE LOSS". [1]
Many skeptics and cynics to the narrative pointed to the inclusion of Jordan Driver Haynes (27), who died of gunshots and not Covid as evidence something was amiss, but the cracks in their story were more subdued.
Only need to consider the very first two names on the list - Patricia Dowd (57) and Marion Krueger (85).
Patricia Dowd died February 6th of a heart attack, some unknown time after recovering from a "flu like illness". Later, after PCR testing her body, they found Covid. So, rather than accepting that 57 year old women die of heart attacks every day (roughly 150 women per day aged 55-64 alone) and this isn't an unusual occurrence, it was decided she died of Covid and this was a tragedy. Note - we have never in history applied PCR tests in search of previous ILI infections to people who died of heart attacks until 2020, so we have no basis of comparison.
Yet in this scenario, the NYT had already conceded that Covid was freely spreading the Bay Area of California in January 2020. At a time when no one was masking, the super deadly, highly transmissible virus which could jump through HVAC units, infect people across hotel rooms, take down entire cruise ships, and wipe out Summer Camps in Georgia, was roaming California months before we realized it.
Marion Krueger was originally believed to be the first fatality, died February 26th in a rehab nursing home. At age 85 she was in decent health until a fall caused her to break her hip, then after entering a rehab nursing home she caught a pneumonia like infection and later succumbed. This is sad, but again, unremarkable. Roughly 1,000 die like this in the US every single day. This is how both of my paternal Grandparents died in their 80s back in 2016 and 2017. This known as a nosocomial infection and is very common. Yet for the first time in history, we went back to the morgue and ran a PCR test to find out which of the millions of viruses out there lead to Mrs. Kruegers death.
And now have the NYT showing us that Covid was penetrating nursing homes in the suburbs of Washington, over a month before it arrived in NYC?
All of this leads to numerous questions:
1) Why didn't hundreds of people die in Washington in February and March? There's not a single excess death signal in Washington during the time period [2] - how could this be? Marion was unmasked, her caregivers were unmasked, shouldn't it have spread throughout the facility? Shouldn't it have spread through many other nursing homes too considering how interwoven the supply chain, healthcare facilities, and staffing are?
2) Before the super deadly, highly transmissible virus made it to a nursing facility in the suburbs of Washington, why didn't it engulf the schools, businesses, restaurants, conventions first (or in addition to) throughout the Pacific Northwest? How did the super deadly, highly transmissible virus hide only among one person on a plane (I assume) from China, then only infect (asymptomatically I assume) a perfect chain of people to reach Marion Krueger - no more, no less?
3) How did the super deadly, highly transmissible virus not spread throughout New York City prior to 3/21/2020 if we accept it was infecting people in nursing homes in early 2020? The New York Metro airport system is the second busiest in the world - some 50 million people would have traveled through NYC-metro in the first three months of 2020 alone, on top of the 25 million residents packed in 4,500 square miles? Instead it just waited until Cuomo shut down the healthcare system and ordered sick nursing home patients back to their facilities?
4) If we accept this argument exponential growth, why didn't Tokyo, which chose to not lockdown, become overwhelmed by the virus in March 2020? If we argue it was the masks, then why did they stop working for Tokyo once they started actually testing for Covid 18 months later? What about Sweden which chose neither and had the best outcome in terms of excess mortality of any country in the world besides Norway?
5) If we had ran this experiment (shutting down hospitals) in NYC in any other year, inducing a mass panic, what would have been the outcome? Suppose we told endocrinologists to not see patients for 1 month back in 2016. Would there be excess deaths? Add to that halting vascular surgical repairs (carotid endarterectomy, AAA, etc)? Would there be excess deaths? Suppose we decided that all nursing home patients with pneumonia, flu, other respiratory diseases must be sent back to their facilities rather than allowing them to recover at hospitals. Would this cause more deaths or less? What if we cancelled all elective medicine? More or less deaths? Suppose we forced patients with Alzheimers to not have any contact from friends or family for 1 month. or 6 months. Would we expect more or less deaths in that cohort? You can continue to apply another hundreds alterations ot the system, all of them clearly bad (i.e., delay Chemo, convince people to stop exercising and just "netflix and chill", increase alcohol consumption, increase depression, delay well-visits, reduce dialysis appointments), and if you really think through each one and try to guess how more people would die than normal as you apply each NPI, you may come to where I am at - I am amazed only an extra 20% more deaths than usual occurred. Because this was a terrible and insane plan from the beginning. We got off easy.
It's embarrassing we even have to talk about this and pretend these are "unknowns" and that these types of decisions made by politicians are correct and infallible. Ridiculous.
I'm with you on all of this - and so is the data - with one tiny exception.
Re: "Cuomo shut down the healthcare system and ordered sick nursing home patients back to their facilities"..."rather than allowing them to recover at hospitals"
How many sick nursing home patients went into the NYC hospitals in spring 2020? How many died there (vs at the nursing home), whether from/with covid or something else?
How many were sent back before "recovering" from being covid-positive?
Do we know?
I ask because Place of Death for NYC in April 2020 (for instance) shows that only 12% (n=1,799) of all covid-attributed deaths that month (n=14,919) took place at nursing homes/LTCFs, whereas a whopping 11,593 covid deaths were in hospitals.
Excellent point and great dataset. First time seeing this one.
First impression is that NYC and surrounding states appear to be unique by having a proportional increase in mortality in both hospital and nursing homes. They both went up roughly 600% in tandem in April 2020 for NYC, but varied between 200%-500% MA, NJ, CT etc.
A quick scan of other states (Florida, California, Ohio, Georgia, South Dakota) I'm not seeing that. Deaths appear unremarkable if looking at nursing home death fluctuations everywhere else in the country, for the entire pandemic. The increases in healthcare facilities don't scale to nursing homes like they do in the upper mid Atlantic states.
I might be wrong; this is just a quick glance / gut check. Will analyze better later.
This was my first clue something was amiss, found the all cause mortality data from the CDC[1] and realized weeks 1-11 in NYC were completely normal (average 1139 deaths compared to 1126 deaths the previous year with no notable deviation) and then suddenly jumped to record 1405 deaths (end of 3/21), then 2805 (3/28), before peaking at 6293 and 7862 deaths (4/4, 4/11, respectively) before receding back to baseline average of 305 deaths/week for the remainder of 2020.
If the virus was spreading through the population between Nov 2019-mid March 2020 as we soon realized, and, it was as devastatingly lethal and contagious as predicted, you would expect an ever increasing all cause mortality trend throughout late 2019 and early 2020. Yet there was nothing.
Not a single indication deaths were on the rise.
The virus, which apparently a single super spreader could infect an entire wedding party of 300, somehow lurked in the background amongst a population of 11,000,000 packed in at 30,000-70,000 people per square mile, not triggering a strain on hospitals or morgues in the 5 months prior the lockdowns.
It just happened to wait until we enacted unprecedented disruptions to society and medical care to emerge.
Sure. Makes complete sense.
Never mind that coincidentally, heart attacks also increased nearly 5 fold immediately following the lockdowns. Complete coincidence... in fact, those heart attacks must have been Long Covid deaths!
You can check my numbers from the CDC:
[1] https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Weekly-Provisional-Counts-of-Deaths-by-State-and-S/muzy-jte6
This is exactly right, and is another dataset I was discussing with some data friends this weekend. I’ll aim to post the graphs this week, so that more people can see what we mean.
I was offered a promotion in NYC back in 2007, and sensing my hesitation my employer lined up an interview at St Johns in Rockaway for my girlfriend who was in her surgical residency so she could continue without setback.
I wound up accompanying her for the tour/pitch, and was taken aback at just how...overrun? crowded? ...I'm not finding the right words here.. I was simply awed at immensely busy the hospital seemed compared to what I was used to.
She was currently rotating through the various Cleveland Clinic hospitals at the time which I was familiar with, but this was something completely different. For the first time I was seeing hospitals running at the frantic pace I only thought existed in TV.
As we walked the hospital and listened to the program director's sales pitch, I saw halls lined with patients, gurneys everywhere, beds filled, and tried to tune out the constant blare of urgent announcements over the loudspeakers. It was surreal, at least to me.
She wasn't fazed much.
I wound up passing on that position for something else, but that experience always stuck with me.
13 years later, learning that hospitals like St Johns would abruptly alter their care model, halting intake of non-covid patients, redirecting patients to alternate care sites or outright discouraging them to seek medical attention out of fear they would get Covid, the engineer in me wondered what that disruption would do? Where would all the potential heart attacks and strokes go? [1] Could this disruption create more collateral damage than it offset? Could the cure possibly be worse than the disease?
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/05/06/850454989/eerie-emptiness-of-ers-worries-doctors-where-are-the-heart-attacks-and-strokes
Yep https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/06/well/live/coronavirus-doctors-hospitals-emergency-care-heart-attack-stroke.html
Jessica, I'm glad you found my Substack site and I have now found your site. You are doing important work here. Thanks.
You're welcome.
I think it's telling that many people are doing these separate inquiries and arriving at similar questions and similar tentative conclusions.
Great anecdote. Thanks.
22% of the increase in U.S. mortality for April 2020 (vs April 2019) was NYC, and 22% of covid-attributed deaths in the U.S. in April 2020 were in NYC.
Vs. NYC being 3% of the U.S. population. And I believe the Northeast--Pennsylvania and states north and east of PA--was a majority of covid-attributed deaths in the U.S. in April 2020.
Quite a stat there. Thanks.
Yes it is.
There is zero chance a stat like that is natural work of this virus.
Michael, I with you 100 percent. The key is that "early spread" did happen - and the IFR was microscopic. So any deaths (there were no doubt some) were "missed." And then deaths explode in a matter of weeks? After the lockdowns.
I hope you will visit my Substack. I've written several pieces documenting the evidence of early spread.
I understand why you call it "early spread" - i.e., earlier than the U.S. government's current official stance about virus "arrival". I also understand why some line of inquiry are framed as "lab leak versus natural emergence."
I prefer to think of the bigger question in terms of "circulation." When did SARS-CoV-2 (or iterations thereof) begin to circulate in the United Staes?
I think we'd get a lot closer to answers if we started with the *null hypothesis*, so to speak. Let's assume that NO excess death has been caused by covid. Where would that lead us?
That's a good point. I'll start to use virus "circulatio"n more in my future writings.
But the circulation was "spreading" from person to person, town-to-town, state-to-state and country-to-country. This contagious virus wasn't "isolated" to a few people or towns. Once it was was circulating, it was spreading.
I don't know. enough about viral dynamics to say whether respiratory viruses travel and replicate like a swarm of bees, which is what "spread" makes me think of. :)
Maybe I've been using the wrong terminology all along!
I’m not saying I know. I really don’t. :)
Thank you so much for the info. The more we see the more we it is likely that we created this mess by our over-reaction.
Great sleuthing but help me understand the argument. Couldn't someone this view this as consistent with the mainstream narrative: the NY lockdowns were timed just at the inflection point when "exponential growth" started to take off. i.e. NY locked down because we saw a small number of cases multiplying and then exponential growth did its thing to create the shape you see. I'm not saying I believe this, I'm trying to understand the counter-argument.
Does seeing a problem with this data rely on believing that covid was in fact circulating widely in the US before March 2020? I believe it was for all the well-established reasons (Michael Senger lists some today) but I'm not sure how widely accepted that is yet?
I'm sure you've seen... https://www.eugyppius.com/p/the-earliest-days-of-the-italian
I didn't make the argument yet - only posted some data and raised a question. :)
We can't find what we're not looking for, unless it makes itself known or there is otherwise a reason to look for it.
At this point, few serious people would deny that SARS-CoV-2 was circulating in the U.S. in late 2019. I believe it was much sooner, but let's go with Dec 2019 for now, per the Red Cross study results. https://www.redcross.org/about-us/news-and-events/press-release/2020/study-suggests-possible-new-covid-19-timeline-in-the-us.html
So, the virus allegedly spreads very quickly, but not quickly in the months during which respiratory viruses spread quickly (in the north)?
The virus is super polite, and waited until mid-March, after Cuomo gave the order?
Good question Ray.
Yes, they do view this as consistent with the mainstream narrative, because it is a simpler explanation and requires little critical thinking by the public. Similar to how selling "the terrorists hate our freedom" was a simple way to market the War on Terror 20 years ago, rather than dissecting the geo-politics of the middle east, assessing the impact of support for Israel, re-thinking the backing of Saudi empire against Iran, and a hundred other considerations which are beyond the attention span of the average person. "Hate our freedoms" was simple and made sense.
So, too, we are stuck with having to explain a very complex chain of interconnected events, analyzing hundreds of data sets, when the Covidians merely get to make up stories as needed which can't be falsified to fit weave their narrative against the events of the last 2 years.
Consider you don't even need Michael Senger's argument, all you need was the May 24th edition of The New York times which ran the headline "US DEATHS NEAR 100,000, AN INCALCULABLE LOSS". [1]
Many skeptics and cynics to the narrative pointed to the inclusion of Jordan Driver Haynes (27), who died of gunshots and not Covid as evidence something was amiss, but the cracks in their story were more subdued.
Only need to consider the very first two names on the list - Patricia Dowd (57) and Marion Krueger (85).
Patricia Dowd died February 6th of a heart attack, some unknown time after recovering from a "flu like illness". Later, after PCR testing her body, they found Covid. So, rather than accepting that 57 year old women die of heart attacks every day (roughly 150 women per day aged 55-64 alone) and this isn't an unusual occurrence, it was decided she died of Covid and this was a tragedy. Note - we have never in history applied PCR tests in search of previous ILI infections to people who died of heart attacks until 2020, so we have no basis of comparison.
Yet in this scenario, the NYT had already conceded that Covid was freely spreading the Bay Area of California in January 2020. At a time when no one was masking, the super deadly, highly transmissible virus which could jump through HVAC units, infect people across hotel rooms, take down entire cruise ships, and wipe out Summer Camps in Georgia, was roaming California months before we realized it.
Marion Krueger was originally believed to be the first fatality, died February 26th in a rehab nursing home. At age 85 she was in decent health until a fall caused her to break her hip, then after entering a rehab nursing home she caught a pneumonia like infection and later succumbed. This is sad, but again, unremarkable. Roughly 1,000 die like this in the US every single day. This is how both of my paternal Grandparents died in their 80s back in 2016 and 2017. This known as a nosocomial infection and is very common. Yet for the first time in history, we went back to the morgue and ran a PCR test to find out which of the millions of viruses out there lead to Mrs. Kruegers death.
And now have the NYT showing us that Covid was penetrating nursing homes in the suburbs of Washington, over a month before it arrived in NYC?
All of this leads to numerous questions:
1) Why didn't hundreds of people die in Washington in February and March? There's not a single excess death signal in Washington during the time period [2] - how could this be? Marion was unmasked, her caregivers were unmasked, shouldn't it have spread throughout the facility? Shouldn't it have spread through many other nursing homes too considering how interwoven the supply chain, healthcare facilities, and staffing are?
2) Before the super deadly, highly transmissible virus made it to a nursing facility in the suburbs of Washington, why didn't it engulf the schools, businesses, restaurants, conventions first (or in addition to) throughout the Pacific Northwest? How did the super deadly, highly transmissible virus hide only among one person on a plane (I assume) from China, then only infect (asymptomatically I assume) a perfect chain of people to reach Marion Krueger - no more, no less?
3) How did the super deadly, highly transmissible virus not spread throughout New York City prior to 3/21/2020 if we accept it was infecting people in nursing homes in early 2020? The New York Metro airport system is the second busiest in the world - some 50 million people would have traveled through NYC-metro in the first three months of 2020 alone, on top of the 25 million residents packed in 4,500 square miles? Instead it just waited until Cuomo shut down the healthcare system and ordered sick nursing home patients back to their facilities?
4) If we accept this argument exponential growth, why didn't Tokyo, which chose to not lockdown, become overwhelmed by the virus in March 2020? If we argue it was the masks, then why did they stop working for Tokyo once they started actually testing for Covid 18 months later? What about Sweden which chose neither and had the best outcome in terms of excess mortality of any country in the world besides Norway?
5) If we had ran this experiment (shutting down hospitals) in NYC in any other year, inducing a mass panic, what would have been the outcome? Suppose we told endocrinologists to not see patients for 1 month back in 2016. Would there be excess deaths? Add to that halting vascular surgical repairs (carotid endarterectomy, AAA, etc)? Would there be excess deaths? Suppose we decided that all nursing home patients with pneumonia, flu, other respiratory diseases must be sent back to their facilities rather than allowing them to recover at hospitals. Would this cause more deaths or less? What if we cancelled all elective medicine? More or less deaths? Suppose we forced patients with Alzheimers to not have any contact from friends or family for 1 month. or 6 months. Would we expect more or less deaths in that cohort? You can continue to apply another hundreds alterations ot the system, all of them clearly bad (i.e., delay Chemo, convince people to stop exercising and just "netflix and chill", increase alcohol consumption, increase depression, delay well-visits, reduce dialysis appointments), and if you really think through each one and try to guess how more people would die than normal as you apply each NPI, you may come to where I am at - I am amazed only an extra 20% more deaths than usual occurred. Because this was a terrible and insane plan from the beginning. We got off easy.
It's embarrassing we even have to talk about this and pretend these are "unknowns" and that these types of decisions made by politicians are correct and infallible. Ridiculous.
__________________________
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/24/us/us-coronavirus-deaths-100000.html
[2] Total Deaths first 12 weeks in the state of Washington: 2017 -14,829; 2018-14,181; 2019-14,381; 2020-14,248 < per CDC
I'm with you on all of this - and so is the data - with one tiny exception.
Re: "Cuomo shut down the healthcare system and ordered sick nursing home patients back to their facilities"..."rather than allowing them to recover at hospitals"
How many sick nursing home patients went into the NYC hospitals in spring 2020? How many died there (vs at the nursing home), whether from/with covid or something else?
How many were sent back before "recovering" from being covid-positive?
Do we know?
I ask because Place of Death for NYC in April 2020 (for instance) shows that only 12% (n=1,799) of all covid-attributed deaths that month (n=14,919) took place at nursing homes/LTCFs, whereas a whopping 11,593 covid deaths were in hospitals.
Source: https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-by-Place-of-Death-and-/uggs-hy5q/data
Excellent point and great dataset. First time seeing this one.
First impression is that NYC and surrounding states appear to be unique by having a proportional increase in mortality in both hospital and nursing homes. They both went up roughly 600% in tandem in April 2020 for NYC, but varied between 200%-500% MA, NJ, CT etc.
A quick scan of other states (Florida, California, Ohio, Georgia, South Dakota) I'm not seeing that. Deaths appear unremarkable if looking at nursing home death fluctuations everywhere else in the country, for the entire pandemic. The increases in healthcare facilities don't scale to nursing homes like they do in the upper mid Atlantic states.
I might be wrong; this is just a quick glance / gut check. Will analyze better later.
You have links for previous years for comparison?
What a detailed and interesting response. Thank you.
The magik number they were spreading was "33"
"33 year or man or woman" died
"3300 cases and rising"
"33% surge"
etc