Panicked people start visiting hospitals (I might have Covid. It’s dangerous. I need medical attention)
Hospitals adjust treatment protocol in respiratory diseases, proactively intubating people and using respirators even if not needed in response to panic?
I’ll add more, based on an experience with a family member:
Person is sick, suspects covid, goes to hospital. Hospital lockdowns prevent family from visiting and essentially eliminates patient advocacy from loved ones. Patient is isolated from an emotional support system. Hospital is overwhelmed and moved to intubation. There’s no family or support structure to ask questions or in the very least talk to the patient and show emotional support.
My 55 year old aunt died in April 2020. Suspected Covid. She was at risk due to health issues. Had family visits, support, etc. Initially. Went on respirator. Family barred from hospital. Came off respirator in bad shape. After two weeks of no visits and in isolation literally told my mother she was giving up. Did not want to continue. Died alone by the end of the week.
The combination of panic, inadequate medical attention, over intubation, elimination of emotional support structure, removal of potential patient advocacy all creates a deadly collision cours, particularly in hospital systems that where already bad pre covid in NYC. Thats my theory at least.
I'm so sorry to hear about your aunt. I wish I could say that is the only instance I've heard of that occurring. Unfortunately, thousands of families have the same story. :(
I would like to see data from NYC and Chicago on how many seniors in public housing died in spring 2020.
;( So sorry for your loss. I agree with your theory.
They were isolating the patients so they could do whatever they wanted to them and then collect the big $$$$ for a Covid death!
I hope we learned a great deal from this horrific crime and never allow it to happen again. I do believe that now they know we’re onto them, and their criminal protocols, that they will come up with something entirely new to kill people off. Of course, there’s the boosters and the Bivalent vaccines that people are still lining up for.
You identified what happened to your aunt ... and now we can just multiply this by hundreds of thousands of people. It's a massive and unreported scandal.
I think you were right to start looking in North Carolina. It hasn’t been covered but the triangle locked down as hard as anywhere in the US and held it longer than almost anywhere in the US. It’s also the most likely origin point in the US given it was a Duke/UNC collab, alongside the WIV that is the most likely origin point for SARS-CoV-2 (understanding that likely something like 95% of the “coronavirus” that was detected globally was not related to SARS-CoV-2). I believe we see small but sustained increases in all-cause beginning in the summer/fall of ‘19, which aligns with the identification of SARS-CoV-2 in waste water in Italy, another collaboration site.
NYC, like most everywhere else in the world simply sacrificed a huge number of high risk individuals at the alter of panic. And that’s why the mortality data looks exactly like you’d expect it to look if there was a war/human sacrifice event.
It’s the off-season rises, though small, in natural cause deaths that’s so notable. It’s entirely possible that SC2 was circulating in the US in 2018, in some form…I’m not saying there was a *release* per se that materialized immediately.
I think the truth is, we simply don’t know how long a leaked/released virus would take to show up in a population.
The other issue is demographic shift in the region. The population of N.C. has been growing SO rapidly, with a huge percentage of the growth being retirees, for a decade, that it can be hard to isolate mortality changes given the population shift.
As for first circulation of SC2, 2018 would make sense logically, as that aligns with the timing on when the NIH unilaterally decided to ignore the ban on GoF research and reintroduce its collab with WIV. How long it takes to circulate is difficult to begin with, but was made more difficult by the watering down of SC2 by purposefully conflating ALL coronaviruses as "the" coronavirus of interest. They very very very purposefully buried a needle in a haystack.
There's a relatively simple logical explanation that SC2 leaked from WIV near the re-start of GoF research in 2018, they knew but didn't care until scientists outside of the research collab synthesized it and realized it appeared constructed as opposed to naturally occurring (late 2019), at which point they went into CYA mode, the NIH discredited all non-associated scientists and put out the highly redacted and re-written report saying it came from the market in Wuhan (always impractical and always irrelevant) and, more importantly, put out tests they knew would capture even trace amounts of any coronavirus strand so the world would be so busy chasing its tail they wouldn't have time to identify the obvious, and, as with all GoF research they already had the "anecdote" created and simply had to make it stable enough for mass production, which they did, and sold it to the tune of trillions of dollars of global market impact.
I work in venture capital, and I've watched a million businesses fail all for the same reason - if you don't admit the mistakes you're making immediately, you basically get trapped doubling down on them and they become infinitely worse. You can't fix a mistake you won't admit was a mistake. I don't think this was some grand conspiracy I think they got caught with their hand in the cookie jar and rather than admit it they took the path of least resistance each step, kept doubling down, and when they realized how dumb/easy everyone in government would be to play, they just kept going and kept printing money all along the way.
The rise was evident in the national data and in multiple states - not just NC. I need to double-check, but IIRC, Florida and Georgia were among the higher ones.
I agree with the plausibility of the 2018 theory. Ethical Skeptic has said on more than one occasion that SARS-CoV-2 is a slow-moving virus, not a fast one. Todd Kenyon recently addressed the ridiculous claim/misconception that covid was suddenly everywhere at once. https://pandauncut.substack.com/p/its-everywhere-all-at-once I think most people have a very "Hollywood" notion of how viruses actually spread.
Understood, this is just harder for me to get my head around as we know that the population is aging, life expectancy is decreasing, and we had kindling after one of the healthiest global flu season on record in 2018. So it's hard to parse real causation from this data, though you're certainly correct it works as a leading indicator that likely should have driven some harder investigation into possible causes.
I've followed ES from the beginning and he's done some fantastic work on this. His theory certainly holds as relates to fight or flight. We've never yet found a virus that's both highly transmissible AND highly dangerous, perhaps with the exception of the Spanish Flu, though I have no idea what to believe related to the Spanish Flu. In general, a virus is either lethal and very slow moving (it has no reason to "flight" if it's winning the "fight") like SARS/MERS or it's very fast moving and non-dangerous (basically all other coronaviruses). Thus why I believe the conflation was purposeful. 1 death is a tragedy, 10k a statistic. If the NIH had to answer for a couple hundred deaths specifically related to their leak of a GoF created viral strand that would have been the death of the NIH. But pretend an uncontrollable virus is running rampant and "killing" 100's of thousands (there's no evidence for this of course, but when you control the CNN death tracker you control society) and you get to go back to being the good guy.
As you note, it was there - and spreading rapidly all across the country. It just wasn't killing large numbers of people and the people it did kill (the elderly and the very ill didn't attract any attention when they died). But some younger people must have been dying. Here's a feature story I wrote (ignored of course) of a 39-year-old Alabama man who nearly died in early January 2020. He didn't die, but there must have been some people like Tim McCain who did die.
Nov 16, 2022·edited Nov 16, 2022Liked by Jessica Hockett
Great post. The NIH went from the greatest villain in history - and certain abolishment of their agency .... to the hero of the world for fighting the virus it helped create and allowed to escape. Very impressive.
Do you have mortality data broken down by sate and age groups? I've got some - especially from Michigan. I do see a "bump" over the five-year-norm in the age group 75 to 84 in the first 13 weeks of 2020 - which is where you would expect to see real COVID Deaths. It's not huge, but it's not small either - 13 to 15 percent increase in some weeks compared to the previous norm. I can share with you via email.
Indeed. North Carolina had unusually LOW "Covid" death tolls in both 2020 and 2021, and probably 2022 as well. As did Maryland and Virginia, as well as DC after yhe first wave. Was that because of the lockdowns? Hardly--more likely because they already had a milder form of the virus in 2019 and already had some prior immunity. Kinda like the entire West Coast, and most of East Asia too.
What is the hypothesis? Lockdowns themselves caused the excess mortality? Panic stricken people rushing to hospitals in fear for their lives overran the medical system and delayed care for those that otherwise may have survived? Respirators and the narcotics people are put on in order to withstand that procedure caused the deaths?
Correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't that hospital in Brooklyn packed out the doors with hyperventilating patients that believed they had covid? That hospital with that nurse who did all of those secret recordings exposing how they were overusing ventilators and killing patients that should have survived.
Either way, I probably should not have put it that way. Very few hospitals were over capacity at all during the "pandemic". Hospitals were purposely emptied out and all staff that the government considered to be non-essential we're told to go home. Rather than saying they were overrun, I probably should have said that they were artificially short staffed while simultaneously being overwhelmed with paranoid asthmatics and extremely unhealthy diabetics panicked about the possibility of having a disease that their televisions commanded the to believe was about 1,000 times more deadly than any real world statistics could have ever shown.
I don't know if this helps but if you want to be puzzled by data there's some interesting going ons here: https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/fluview/mortality.html remove COVID and only look at P&I (how or why they group Flu with Pneumonia i dunno but they do) ---P&I is currently killing more than COVID
If it's COVID induced pneumonia (the rebuttal i receive often) why are they not counting them in the COVIDs?
This isn't entirely on-topic, but I wonder how many of the people discussed in the post who died in March and April 2020 would have died at some point in the following 2 years, regardless of whether the virus existed. We hear about covid nursing home deaths, and how a majority of nursing home residents die within 12 months of move-in.
I don't call "2 years early" a pull-forward death, but you're right that the average tenure of a nursing home death isn't long.
But that doesn't mean the March/April/May 2020 event wasn't largely comprised of wrongful deaths that weren't the fault of the natural course of the virus.
Great work Jessica. How long ago did we start talking about this? >2 years ago? Over at PANDA we have reached similar conclusions. There is nothing natural about those early spikes. There is clear evidence of sc2 prior to official narrative. There is clear evidence of pre-existing immunity. Mortality in Bergamo followed political boundaries vs demonstrating natural spread patterns. It goes on and on. One thing we are certain of. Whether natural or lab origin, it didn’t arise from a single point source in location and time and then quickly cause these spikes.
This seems to support the claim that the key driver of deaths in New York at that time was the aggressive use of ventilators and other abusive hospital protocols, rather than the virus itself.
I would say the root cause of the key drivers of deaths were: being compensated by the federal government for the amount of Covid cases and deaths a hospital had! The hospitals were reimbursed for killing people, basically.
We have a respiratory virus that spreads most often in households so we locked everyone in NYC in their apartments to slow transmission and, oddly, the virus took off.
Good point but it's interesting that we have never seen a spike in deaths this large in April and we have never locked literally everyone in the apartments for two weeks. No other city suffered like this in the US. Was it a perfect storm of events, i.e. just enough of the virus around and lockdowns?
Thanks for responding. I totally understand your point and I found your question and research very interesting. The virus was circulating in Dec 2019 and Jan 2020 from Red Cross blood donation data and most likely the fall. It was there but your analysis demonstrated that it was not having a visible effect on the data. I am wondering if mass exposing 8 million people to it all at once increased rates of infection, leading to increased deaths that may not have otherwise happened. In other words, doing something that sounded like a good idea at the time but we never did before to fight a virus not only didn't work but made matters far worse (not my idea, see @ProfessorAkston). On the flip side, here in Maine, we had roughly 1000 COVID deaths out of a population of 1.3 million. If we weren't testing, I would be surprised if it would have been noticed. We locked down but we have zero ability to lock people up in crowded conditions. We have like 12 apartment buildings in the whole state. I will try and locate the data to see what it looks like
Correct re: the Red Cross samples...it would be nice if the Red Cross would pull samples from earlier in 2019. It would also be nice if the FDA would test the samples it has from EVALI patients, and if the CDC would test the samples from the northern Virginia nursing home summer 2019 outbreaks. (I'm guessing all that has been done already...so what I'm really saying is that they should share the results.)
The Red Cross study showed positivity in places like Wisconsin (which is also where a good number the summer 2019 EVALI cases were reported).
I agree with @ProfessorAkston that we made matters worse with lockdowns. But it's not clear to me that lockdowns necessarily would have made a virus that had already been circulating with no real impact on all-cause mortality virulent enough to kill 19,000 people in a matter of weeks..
This is great data, the type I've been looking for. My theory is the same as yours. I think circulation or spread began in probably October 2019 - with many more people having an ILI at some time in November, then with sustained widespread and severe ILI throughout almost all of December and January. People were "sick" and I think some percentage of these sick people did have COVID. But I wouldn't expect to see a conspicuous spike in deaths because Covid doesn't kill many people. However, I would or might expect to see a small increase in all-cause deaths beginning in these months, especially in December and January and maybe February. I expect this because I know from my own reporting of several people who had Covid who were very sick and almost died. My thought would be - they didn't die (they were lucky), but some people must have died - especially those 80 and older with pre-existing conditions. I think I've found good data from Michigan that shows a noticeable increase in deaths in the first 13 weeks of 2020 in the 75 to 84 demo. Not huge, but atypical compared to the raw numbers from the previous five years in the same weeks. I'd love to email you this week-by-week data and get your thoughts.
In your graphs, it looks to me like there could be evidence of this from an apparent "spike" in "hospital deaths in late 2019 (beginning week 49 through 52). Also in Weeks 2-6 2020.
Also “heart” deaths Weeks 51 and and 52 2019 - I see a noticeable spike.
There is yet another way the lockdowns and restrictions could be iatrogenic, by putting selective pressure on the virus to favor deadlier and more contagious strains.
Two things to consider perhaps—
Panicked people start visiting hospitals (I might have Covid. It’s dangerous. I need medical attention)
Hospitals adjust treatment protocol in respiratory diseases, proactively intubating people and using respirators even if not needed in response to panic?
I agree re: the lethal use of intubation.
I’ll add more, based on an experience with a family member:
Person is sick, suspects covid, goes to hospital. Hospital lockdowns prevent family from visiting and essentially eliminates patient advocacy from loved ones. Patient is isolated from an emotional support system. Hospital is overwhelmed and moved to intubation. There’s no family or support structure to ask questions or in the very least talk to the patient and show emotional support.
My 55 year old aunt died in April 2020. Suspected Covid. She was at risk due to health issues. Had family visits, support, etc. Initially. Went on respirator. Family barred from hospital. Came off respirator in bad shape. After two weeks of no visits and in isolation literally told my mother she was giving up. Did not want to continue. Died alone by the end of the week.
The combination of panic, inadequate medical attention, over intubation, elimination of emotional support structure, removal of potential patient advocacy all creates a deadly collision cours, particularly in hospital systems that where already bad pre covid in NYC. Thats my theory at least.
Correct.
I'm so sorry to hear about your aunt. I wish I could say that is the only instance I've heard of that occurring. Unfortunately, thousands of families have the same story. :(
I would like to see data from NYC and Chicago on how many seniors in public housing died in spring 2020.
That is a very sad story. My condolences
;( So sorry for your loss. I agree with your theory.
They were isolating the patients so they could do whatever they wanted to them and then collect the big $$$$ for a Covid death!
I hope we learned a great deal from this horrific crime and never allow it to happen again. I do believe that now they know we’re onto them, and their criminal protocols, that they will come up with something entirely new to kill people off. Of course, there’s the boosters and the Bivalent vaccines that people are still lining up for.
You identified what happened to your aunt ... and now we can just multiply this by hundreds of thousands of people. It's a massive and unreported scandal.
Definitely, but it's much more than just intubation and the vents, as Jessica seems to be proving.
I think you were right to start looking in North Carolina. It hasn’t been covered but the triangle locked down as hard as anywhere in the US and held it longer than almost anywhere in the US. It’s also the most likely origin point in the US given it was a Duke/UNC collab, alongside the WIV that is the most likely origin point for SARS-CoV-2 (understanding that likely something like 95% of the “coronavirus” that was detected globally was not related to SARS-CoV-2). I believe we see small but sustained increases in all-cause beginning in the summer/fall of ‘19, which aligns with the identification of SARS-CoV-2 in waste water in Italy, another collaboration site.
NYC, like most everywhere else in the world simply sacrificed a huge number of high risk individuals at the alter of panic. And that’s why the mortality data looks exactly like you’d expect it to look if there was a war/human sacrifice event.
It’s the off-season rises, though small, in natural cause deaths that’s so notable. It’s entirely possible that SC2 was circulating in the US in 2018, in some form…I’m not saying there was a *release* per se that materialized immediately.
I think the truth is, we simply don’t know how long a leaked/released virus would take to show up in a population.
The other issue is demographic shift in the region. The population of N.C. has been growing SO rapidly, with a huge percentage of the growth being retirees, for a decade, that it can be hard to isolate mortality changes given the population shift.
As for first circulation of SC2, 2018 would make sense logically, as that aligns with the timing on when the NIH unilaterally decided to ignore the ban on GoF research and reintroduce its collab with WIV. How long it takes to circulate is difficult to begin with, but was made more difficult by the watering down of SC2 by purposefully conflating ALL coronaviruses as "the" coronavirus of interest. They very very very purposefully buried a needle in a haystack.
There's a relatively simple logical explanation that SC2 leaked from WIV near the re-start of GoF research in 2018, they knew but didn't care until scientists outside of the research collab synthesized it and realized it appeared constructed as opposed to naturally occurring (late 2019), at which point they went into CYA mode, the NIH discredited all non-associated scientists and put out the highly redacted and re-written report saying it came from the market in Wuhan (always impractical and always irrelevant) and, more importantly, put out tests they knew would capture even trace amounts of any coronavirus strand so the world would be so busy chasing its tail they wouldn't have time to identify the obvious, and, as with all GoF research they already had the "anecdote" created and simply had to make it stable enough for mass production, which they did, and sold it to the tune of trillions of dollars of global market impact.
I work in venture capital, and I've watched a million businesses fail all for the same reason - if you don't admit the mistakes you're making immediately, you basically get trapped doubling down on them and they become infinitely worse. You can't fix a mistake you won't admit was a mistake. I don't think this was some grand conspiracy I think they got caught with their hand in the cookie jar and rather than admit it they took the path of least resistance each step, kept doubling down, and when they realized how dumb/easy everyone in government would be to play, they just kept going and kept printing money all along the way.
Anyway, just my thought on the whole thing...
The rise was evident in the national data and in multiple states - not just NC. I need to double-check, but IIRC, Florida and Georgia were among the higher ones.
I agree with the plausibility of the 2018 theory. Ethical Skeptic has said on more than one occasion that SARS-CoV-2 is a slow-moving virus, not a fast one. Todd Kenyon recently addressed the ridiculous claim/misconception that covid was suddenly everywhere at once. https://pandauncut.substack.com/p/its-everywhere-all-at-once I think most people have a very "Hollywood" notion of how viruses actually spread.
We are on the same page re: "conspiracy".
Understood, this is just harder for me to get my head around as we know that the population is aging, life expectancy is decreasing, and we had kindling after one of the healthiest global flu season on record in 2018. So it's hard to parse real causation from this data, though you're certainly correct it works as a leading indicator that likely should have driven some harder investigation into possible causes.
I've followed ES from the beginning and he's done some fantastic work on this. His theory certainly holds as relates to fight or flight. We've never yet found a virus that's both highly transmissible AND highly dangerous, perhaps with the exception of the Spanish Flu, though I have no idea what to believe related to the Spanish Flu. In general, a virus is either lethal and very slow moving (it has no reason to "flight" if it's winning the "fight") like SARS/MERS or it's very fast moving and non-dangerous (basically all other coronaviruses). Thus why I believe the conflation was purposeful. 1 death is a tragedy, 10k a statistic. If the NIH had to answer for a couple hundred deaths specifically related to their leak of a GoF created viral strand that would have been the death of the NIH. But pretend an uncontrollable virus is running rampant and "killing" 100's of thousands (there's no evidence for this of course, but when you control the CNN death tracker you control society) and you get to go back to being the good guy.
Re: NYC data, my point isn't related to causation per se. I just want people to show me where this highly-contagious virus was before lockdown :)
As you note, it was there - and spreading rapidly all across the country. It just wasn't killing large numbers of people and the people it did kill (the elderly and the very ill didn't attract any attention when they died). But some younger people must have been dying. Here's a feature story I wrote (ignored of course) of a 39-year-old Alabama man who nearly died in early January 2020. He didn't die, but there must have been some people like Tim McCain who did die.
https://uncoverdc.com/2020/06/25/an-alabama-man-nearly-died-from-covid-19-the-first-week-in-january/
Great post. The NIH went from the greatest villain in history - and certain abolishment of their agency .... to the hero of the world for fighting the virus it helped create and allowed to escape. Very impressive.
If the the U.S. is at least in part responsible for the "creation" and release/leak of SARS-CoV-2, how do we imagine they would act?
Like they've been acting.
Do you have mortality data broken down by sate and age groups? I've got some - especially from Michigan. I do see a "bump" over the five-year-norm in the age group 75 to 84 in the first 13 weeks of 2020 - which is where you would expect to see real COVID Deaths. It's not huge, but it's not small either - 13 to 15 percent increase in some weeks compared to the previous norm. I can share with you via email.
Sure, email. WoodhouseSub@proton.me
Indeed. North Carolina had unusually LOW "Covid" death tolls in both 2020 and 2021, and probably 2022 as well. As did Maryland and Virginia, as well as DC after yhe first wave. Was that because of the lockdowns? Hardly--more likely because they already had a milder form of the virus in 2019 and already had some prior immunity. Kinda like the entire West Coast, and most of East Asia too.
What is the hypothesis? Lockdowns themselves caused the excess mortality? Panic stricken people rushing to hospitals in fear for their lives overran the medical system and delayed care for those that otherwise may have survived? Respirators and the narcotics people are put on in order to withstand that procedure caused the deaths?
Where were medical systems overrun? Have you seen any actual data for a NYC hospital that shows it being overrun? (Genuinely asking.)
Thought experiment re: lockdown mortality...
Pretend there was no virus and NYC "locked down" for 2-4 weeks for some other reason, but did the same things they did in spring 2020.
Would we expect deaths to go up? Why or why not?
Correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't that hospital in Brooklyn packed out the doors with hyperventilating patients that believed they had covid? That hospital with that nurse who did all of those secret recordings exposing how they were overusing ventilators and killing patients that should have survived.
Either way, I probably should not have put it that way. Very few hospitals were over capacity at all during the "pandemic". Hospitals were purposely emptied out and all staff that the government considered to be non-essential we're told to go home. Rather than saying they were overrun, I probably should have said that they were artificially short staffed while simultaneously being overwhelmed with paranoid asthmatics and extremely unhealthy diabetics panicked about the possibility of having a disease that their televisions commanded the to believe was about 1,000 times more deadly than any real world statistics could have ever shown.
I don't know if this helps but if you want to be puzzled by data there's some interesting going ons here: https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/fluview/mortality.html remove COVID and only look at P&I (how or why they group Flu with Pneumonia i dunno but they do) ---P&I is currently killing more than COVID
If it's COVID induced pneumonia (the rebuttal i receive often) why are they not counting them in the COVIDs?
it's interesting how little flu was accounted for during the initial stages of the emergency in 2020
week 20 of the '19-'20 flu season we were in it pretty bad and then it falls off a cliff, across the globe mysteriously... and now it's back... yea ok
didn't Fauci come down with the flu in 2020 after having been vaccinated? seem to recall yes
how did we avoid "twindemic" in '20-'21? seems very odd
Love this post. Facts and data are far more useful than they will admit. Lol
This isn't entirely on-topic, but I wonder how many of the people discussed in the post who died in March and April 2020 would have died at some point in the following 2 years, regardless of whether the virus existed. We hear about covid nursing home deaths, and how a majority of nursing home residents die within 12 months of move-in.
I don't call "2 years early" a pull-forward death, but you're right that the average tenure of a nursing home death isn't long.
But that doesn't mean the March/April/May 2020 event wasn't largely comprised of wrongful deaths that weren't the fault of the natural course of the virus.
Excellent work
High school math, at most. :)
More the critical thinking behind it and the care of execution than the math. :)
Place of Death data is a neglected source of inquiry. I first took notice of it in late 2020/2021.
though the math is good, too. :)
There are so many questions.
We were misled on purpose so often n the past 2 plus years.
Great work Jessica. How long ago did we start talking about this? >2 years ago? Over at PANDA we have reached similar conclusions. There is nothing natural about those early spikes. There is clear evidence of sc2 prior to official narrative. There is clear evidence of pre-existing immunity. Mortality in Bergamo followed political boundaries vs demonstrating natural spread patterns. It goes on and on. One thing we are certain of. Whether natural or lab origin, it didn’t arise from a single point source in location and time and then quickly cause these spikes.
Yep, we've been talking about this a long time.
Your best observation on this is that covid was nowhere until it was everywhere.
So. Freaking. True.
This seems to support the claim that the key driver of deaths in New York at that time was the aggressive use of ventilators and other abusive hospital protocols, rather than the virus itself.
Correct.
I would say the root cause of the key drivers of deaths were: being compensated by the federal government for the amount of Covid cases and deaths a hospital had! The hospitals were reimbursed for killing people, basically.
We have a respiratory virus that spreads most often in households so we locked everyone in NYC in their apartments to slow transmission and, oddly, the virus took off.
Yet, the virus wasn’t spreading indoors during the coldest months - when people were most likely to be spending time indoors - because…?
Good point but it's interesting that we have never seen a spike in deaths this large in April and we have never locked literally everyone in the apartments for two weeks. No other city suffered like this in the US. Was it a perfect storm of events, i.e. just enough of the virus around and lockdowns?
It was more than two weeks. :)
I think you're missing the point in my post about "where" the virus was prior to lockdown.
Is your theory that covid was circulating but didn't become deadly until people were spending their days in their homes?
Thanks for responding. I totally understand your point and I found your question and research very interesting. The virus was circulating in Dec 2019 and Jan 2020 from Red Cross blood donation data and most likely the fall. It was there but your analysis demonstrated that it was not having a visible effect on the data. I am wondering if mass exposing 8 million people to it all at once increased rates of infection, leading to increased deaths that may not have otherwise happened. In other words, doing something that sounded like a good idea at the time but we never did before to fight a virus not only didn't work but made matters far worse (not my idea, see @ProfessorAkston). On the flip side, here in Maine, we had roughly 1000 COVID deaths out of a population of 1.3 million. If we weren't testing, I would be surprised if it would have been noticed. We locked down but we have zero ability to lock people up in crowded conditions. We have like 12 apartment buildings in the whole state. I will try and locate the data to see what it looks like
Correct re: the Red Cross samples...it would be nice if the Red Cross would pull samples from earlier in 2019. It would also be nice if the FDA would test the samples it has from EVALI patients, and if the CDC would test the samples from the northern Virginia nursing home summer 2019 outbreaks. (I'm guessing all that has been done already...so what I'm really saying is that they should share the results.)
The Red Cross study showed positivity in places like Wisconsin (which is also where a good number the summer 2019 EVALI cases were reported).
I agree with @ProfessorAkston that we made matters worse with lockdowns. But it's not clear to me that lockdowns necessarily would have made a virus that had already been circulating with no real impact on all-cause mortality virulent enough to kill 19,000 people in a matter of weeks..
And put selective pressure on the virus as well. Gasoline on the fire, basically.
This is great data, the type I've been looking for. My theory is the same as yours. I think circulation or spread began in probably October 2019 - with many more people having an ILI at some time in November, then with sustained widespread and severe ILI throughout almost all of December and January. People were "sick" and I think some percentage of these sick people did have COVID. But I wouldn't expect to see a conspicuous spike in deaths because Covid doesn't kill many people. However, I would or might expect to see a small increase in all-cause deaths beginning in these months, especially in December and January and maybe February. I expect this because I know from my own reporting of several people who had Covid who were very sick and almost died. My thought would be - they didn't die (they were lucky), but some people must have died - especially those 80 and older with pre-existing conditions. I think I've found good data from Michigan that shows a noticeable increase in deaths in the first 13 weeks of 2020 in the 75 to 84 demo. Not huge, but atypical compared to the raw numbers from the previous five years in the same weeks. I'd love to email you this week-by-week data and get your thoughts.
In your graphs, it looks to me like there could be evidence of this from an apparent "spike" in "hospital deaths in late 2019 (beginning week 49 through 52). Also in Weeks 2-6 2020.
Also “heart” deaths Weeks 51 and and 52 2019 - I see a noticeable spike.
Excellent data. I'd like to exchange emails with you on this topic. My email is:
wjricejunior@gmail.com
Excellent article. The plot thickens.
There is yet another way the lockdowns and restrictions could be iatrogenic, by putting selective pressure on the virus to favor deadlier and more contagious strains.