New York City’s death toll in the first Covid wave was unusually high. By the end of June the city had suffered excess deaths of 183 per 100,000 people. For comparison, nearby Maryland suffered 60 per 100,000 in the same period.
The reason so many people died in New York that spring has been speculated on since the start. One popular theory is that it was the mania for mechanical ventilators that was chiefly to blame. For instance, Michael Senger writes:
The outsized number of excess deaths in the area around New York is better explained by the particular hysteria in that region for mechanical ventilators which decreased the survival rate for patients over age 65 by 26-fold.
While Senger elsewhere allows that “other iatrogenesis” may have played a role, he takes the main culprit to be ventilators, as the above quote indicates. He is far from alone in this view.
However, it is straightforward to show from public data that mechanical ventilation cannot be responsible for more than 20% – or a fifth – of the Covid deaths in NYC that spring.
The first salient fact is that just 12% of NYC hospitalised patients were on mechanical ventilation as of April 4th 2020, according to a study in JAMA. The same study shows that the death rate for intubated Covid patients was 88%.
According to the CDC, 32% of NYC Covid hospital patients died during the first wave. (The CDC notes this rate was similar to the U.K. rate of 33%.)
If we assume that the 88% ventilator mortality rate continued after April 4th then ventilator deaths would account for 11% of all hospital patients and thus 34% of all hospital deaths (i.e., 11% ÷ 32%).
Hospital deaths were 79% of total NYC first wave deaths, again according to the CDC (this is assuming that deaths not at home or in a nursing home were in hospital).
This means that deaths of intubated patients accounted for 27% of total NYC first wave deaths (i.e., 34% × 79%). The normal death rate for patients on mechanical ventilation suffering from viral pneumonia is 22%, according to a study from Atlanta. So if we (conservatively) assume that all Covid ventilator deaths above that level were avoidable, preventing those would cut the NYC Covid death toll by 20% (i.e., 75% of 27%, where 75% is 100%–(22% ÷ 88%)). The NYC ventilator panic cannot be blamed for more than that.
It might be suggested that NYC simply intubated too many people unnecessarily and should have intubated far fewer. However, 12% of hospital patients being on mechanical ventilation is relatively low compared to, for example, England in its various Covid waves. The proportion of hospital patients on mechanical ventilation in NYC was not unusually high.
Why was the NYC ventilator mortality rate so high? The Atlanta study compares it to the rates for other states and finds it at the top end.
In some of the earliest reports of COVID-19 from Wuhan, mortality rates among those admitted to ICUs ranged from 52-62%, and increased to 86-97% among those requiring invasive mechanical ventilation. In more recent data from the United Kingdom, 67% of those who had received mechanical ventilation died, as compared to 22% of patients intubated with viral pneumonia in the preceding three years. Early reports of smaller cohorts from Seattle, where some of the first COVID-19 outbreaks occurred in the United States, indicated that 50-67% of patients admitted to the ICU and 71-75% of those receiving invasive mechanical ventilation died. A recently published report from New York also found high mortality of 88.1% among those who required mechanical ventilation.
For Atlanta, the study found a rate of 47% (49 died, 55 discharged), which the authors attempt to explain by suggesting that a policy of early intubation helped lower the death rate: “Our internal guidelines emphasised early intubation and standard lung-protective ventilation strategies.”
If Atlanta was intubating more readily while NYC was prioritising sicker patients, that could explain the difference. However, that would be the opposite of the iatrogenic theory, which argues that early intubation is what was killing people.
In any case, with intubated patients accounting for just 12% of hospital patients and 34% of hospital deaths, and hospital deaths making up 79% of all deaths, ventilators cannot be held responsible for more than a fifth of NYC first wave deaths.
The New York nursing home policy of discharging Covid positive patients into the homes has also been blamed for killing large numbers of older people unnecessarily. However, with only 12% of NYC Covid deaths occurring in nursing homes, there is a clear limit to how much that can explain as well.
Wrongheaded policies and treatment protocols certainly contributed to excess deaths during the pandemic. However, there can be little doubt that most of the excess deaths during Covid waves were due to the virus. That’s why they invariably closely track the other epidemiological measures. Symptoms, PCR test positivity, LFT positivity, genetic sequencing of variants, hospitalisations and antibodies all rise and fall together as waves pass through. A review in the Lancet of all 1,095 autopsies of Covid-positive patients in Germany found that 86% died directly due to the virus and 14% died with the virus as a secondary cause (or incidentally present).
Lockdown scepticism doesn’t rest on proving that COVID-19 is no more severe than the flu. Flu is generally understood to have a 0.1% fatality rate. Professor John Ioannidis estimated the fatality rate of Covid in the first wave to be around 0.4% in Europe and the Americas (note that NYC’s overall excess mortality, after three years, no longer stands out). The slightly higher fatality rate is not unexpected for a virus slightly more severe than influenza. Lockdown scepticism does not depend on convincing people that that 0.4% is really 0.1%. Rather, it depends on convincing people that our freedoms, prosperity and way of life should not be sacrificed in order to try to suppress or contain a virus with a mortality rate well below 1%.
Of course, we should also try to identify policies and treatment protocols that were harmful in order not to repeat them. And pointing out that interventions aren’t actually anywhere near as effective as claimed is always worthwhile. But the most important goal is to establish the priority of freedom over cowering in fear from a not-so-deadly virus.
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”So What you are Saying is”
The lung infection resulting from covid was originally called novel coronavirus infected pneumonia.
Up to 30% of pneumonia patients in hospital died from it even before covid.
Large cities, and the suburbs that surround them, particularly in the developing world, have large numbers of elderly people with a history of lung infections caused by pollution.
Pneumonia is extremely dangerous to the elderly and infirm with a previous history of lung infection.
New York, in common with many other large cities, had relatively high covid mortality as a consequence of pollution and the lung infections caused by it.
It would be useful to know how age standardised covid mortality in New York compares to other bad influenza years.
Northern Italy, the region that sparked the covid panic in Europe, has very bad air quality due to pollutants.
Maybe 12000 people died in London from the great ‘smog’ in a week in Dec. 1952
So the answer to a high death toll from what is now just another endemic common cold coronavirus is, quite clearly, to reduce air pollution, not to lock everyone down, stick liquids of uncertain provenance into their veins or insist that they wear peculiar and flimsy face coverings.
As the Common Cold Unit pointed out as far back as 1990, the best treatment for a mutating coronavirus is simply rest to allow the immune system to do its work.
Wouldn’t it be great if the medical profession went back to saying that, as they always used to?
Could you be more specific about the types of pollution that cause respiratory weakness? I think the ONS recently released data that said that only one death in was due to poor air quality in the last 20 years in London. Maybe we have an older cohort that worked in polluting industries (since cleaned up and/or moved overseas) that are vulnerable?
‘…active cigarette smoking upregulates ACE-2 expression in the lower airways, which may partially explain the increased risk of severe COVID-19 in these populations. If air pollutants act similarly to the agents released during smoking, it is probable that individuals with chronic exposure to these compounds would have low ACE-2 activity or greater susceptibility to the infection.’
‘The present study demonstrates that higher rates of spread of COVID-19 in Metropolitan Lima (Peru) are associated with previous long-term PM2.5 exposure. Men and older people were at higher risk of death due to COVID-19.’
https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-021-11232-7
‘This paper investigates the air quality in 107 Italian provinces in the period 2014–2019 and the association between exposure to nine outdoor air pollutants and the COVID-19 spread and related mortality in the same areas. The methods used were negative binomial (NB) regression, ordinary least squares (OLS) model, and spatial autoregressive (SAR) model. The results showed that (i) common air pollutants—nitrogen dioxide (NO2), ozone (O3), and particulate matter (PM2.5 and PM10)—were highly and positively correlated with large firms, energy and gas consumption, public transports, and livestock sector; (ii) long-term exposure to NO2, PM2.5, PM10, benzene, benzo[a]pyrene (BaP), and cadmium (Cd) was positively and significantly correlated with the spread of COVID-19; and (iii) long-term exposure to NO2, O3, PM2.5, PM10, and arsenic (As) was positively and significantly correlated with COVID-19 related mortality. Specifically, particulate matter and Cd showed the most adverse effect on COVID-19 prevalence; while particulate matter and As showed the largest dangerous impact on excess mortality rate.’
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-17215-x
All of which you can absolutely believe.
If you want to.
Oh for heaven’s sake! Air pollution has been killing people for years in this country.
Legislation, as a consequence, commenced with the Smoke Nuisance Abatement (Metropolis) Act as far back as 1853.
And that one death in 20 years, nationally – not just in London – (compared to the GangGreen agit-prop of 40,000 per year) was, as I recall, a severely asthmatic little girl in an Afro-Carribean family who happened to live very close to a major road junction.
Tragic.
A naughty cynic might wonder what the atmosphere within the home was like. Smokers? Moulds? DIY activity sanding down old paint? Someone will have discounted this, surely?
The mother had been complaining about traffic fumes for ages, but with a severely asthmatic child, hadn’t managed to move elsewhere, apparently.
A Coroner was found who conveniently was concerned about air pollution. He was probably 100% correct. But that naughty cynic still has doubts.
Of cause, reducing air “pollution” is a good thing, especially if it can be demonstrated that is a cost effective way of reducing sickness, let alone deaths.
But that cynic has doubts that it often is, the more so having myself lived through the 1950s smogs which were several orders of magnitude worse and being aware of the US EPA “Six Cities” study which was fraudulent and blatantly illegal.
Just as well no-one cares what cynics think, when Project Fear dictates a certain approach!
“a history of lung infections caused by pollution” – caused, or vaguely correlated and hence, attributed by some?
There’s likely a simpler fix, which is to encourage people to supplement with vitamin D. Vitamin D deficiency is extremely common, particularly in the spring, and it’s strongly associated with COVID hospitalisation. Elderly Italians have shockingly low vitamin D levels:
“Italy is one of the Countries with the highest prevalence of hypovitaminosis D in Europe. A study from Isaia et al on 700 women aged 60-80 yrs in Italy found values of 25OH vitaminD lower than 5 ng/ml in 27% of the women and lower than 12 ng/ml in as many as 76%” https://www.bmj.com/content/368/bmj.m810/rr-36
Had NICE not put a Nelsonian blind eye to the telescope in 2020 by publishing a rapid review of vitamin D that ignored deficiency and declared “no evidence”, it’s quite likely there would have been no pandemic and no WHO pandemic treaty.
I agree re vitamin D but it is probably not either or, rather both?
‘The 62 848 residents generated 4408 cases. Yearly average PM2.5 exposure was 12.5 µg/m3. Age, living in a residential care home, history of stroke and medications for diabetes, hypertension and obstructive airway diseases were independently associated with COVID-19. In single-pollutant multivariate models, PM2.5 was associated with a 5.1% increase in the rate of COVID-19 (95% CI 2.7% to 7.5%), corresponding to 294 additional cases per 100 000 person-years. The association was confirmed in bi-pollutant models; excluding subjects in residential care homes; and further adjusting for area-based indicators of socioeconomic level and use of public transportation. Similar findings were observed for PM10, NO2 and NO. Ozone was associated with a 2% decrease in disease rate, the association being reversed in bi-pollutant models.
Conclusions Long-term exposure to low levels of air pollutants, especially PM2.5, increased the incidence of COVID-19…..’
https://oem.bmj.com/content/79/3/192
Oooh, YouDontSay!
Naughty, naughty!
All of Will’s posting seems, stangely to be suggesting that, OK, perhaps intubation wasn’t a great idea but it only killed a few thousand, even deaths in care homes weren’t so bad.
Perhaps the gene therapy jabba jabbas weren’t absolutely the thing but, Hey! Even Whitty, Vallance and Hancock were doing their best!
Weren’t they?
I have doubts, probably just me.
But the interesting question, as you suggest, how many people were killed because our Public Health Authorities decided that Vitamin D was unhelpful and that we must deny people early or prophylactic treatment with Ivermectin or Hydroxychloriquine? Those “dangerous” horse de- wormers?
Those cheap as dirt and proven safe treatments seem to have been just a bit “safe and effective”.
Unfortunately not favoured by Gates, Fauci and the WHO. Strange.
‘… have large numbers of elderly people with a history of lung infections caused by pollution.’
Lung infections are caused by pathogens not air pollution. People with existing respiratory ailments may have their condition worsened by air pollution. Elderly people die; just a matter of time.
Respiratory tract diseases, notably cancers, are rife in undeveloped Countries from airborne particulates from wood and animal dung fires, or in some cases coal.
In cities in developed Countries, regulations allow only smokeless fuels, except of course the latest idiocy that says it’s OK to burn wood because… climate change.
Most air pollution is from natural sources, sand and topsoil being lifted and carried by strong, warm air currents, volcano activity – much if that under-sea, pollens from plants, mites.
Susceptibility to lung infections, covid 19, is increased by pollution, reference above
And prior upper respiratory infections also increase susceptibility.
‘In summary, previous influenza/URI histories were associated with elevated COVID-19 susceptibility and morbidity in Korea.’
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-00428-x
Precisely.
PM2.5 measurements taken at enormous expense at a site in North Yorkshire proved to be particles predominantly of topsoil, a tiny fraction of coal dust or flyash, fine sand, especially from the Sahara (sic!), salt crystals from Atlantic storms, fragments of tyre rubber and so forth.
Some, might have came from the large earthmoving equipment within the site boundary but even looking at wind direction and speed, difficult to draw conclusions.
Measurements taken in York City were taken as close as feasible to kerbsides close to traffic held up by traffic lights. Obviously absolutely representative of atmosphere breathed by anyone. Not.
Quite. I looked up stats for causes of death globally. What jumped out were deaths from lower respiratory infection. For 2019 (pre Covid) it was 2.4 million and for 2020 (Covid) it was 2.5 million.
Those that promoted Induced panic have a lot to answer for.
They most certainly do.
‘Multiple linear regression models indicate elevation, mean solar radiation, air quality, population density and green vegetation cover, as a socioeconomic proxy, are influential factors in the distribution of infection and mortality of SARS-CoV-2 in Peru.
Our results also strongly suggest that exposure to poor air quality is a significant factor in the mortality of individuals below the age of 30. We conclude that environmental and climatic factors do play a significant role in the transmission and case fatality rates in Peru’
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/jbcpp-2021-0007/html?lang=en
Ever wonder why life expectancy in some of the most heavily air polluted cities on Earth (Peking, Bombay, Delhi, Mandalay), keeprs on rising?
No-one with an axe to grind?
No rulings by the US EPA that a trace gas essential to all life on Earth is, actually a “Pollutant”?
“Nature” famed for not promoting political Agit-prop?
Because youngsters move to those cities in droves.
And increasing prosperity improves living conditions.
This is not rocket science! If you smoke, you will reduce your life expectancy. Similarly, if you live in a conurbation, you will suffer from air pollution.
‘Europe’s environmental quality has been steadily
improving over recent decades. Nonetheless, air
pollution and noise continue to contribute to serious
illnesses and premature deaths, especially in urban
areas.’
https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/unequal-exposure-and-unequal-impacts
Thinking further on what you are saying. I agree that the best treatment is and would have been rest and allow the immune system to work. I don’t quite agree with your assertions around pollution. Pre-industrial UK life expectancy was 40 years and it started to improve as wealth improved while industry and cities grew so that we now have a life expectancy of over 80 years. In the case of Italy, while it can be argued that the air quality around Milan is notorious for being poor, it is also where the wealthiest and most industrious Italians live.
https://www.gapminder.org/fw/world-health-chart/
It seems there is heightened focus on pollution in the developed world which is actually where it is a background issue and improving all the time. The worst cases of respiratory illnesses caused by pollution occur in un-developed countries where people have to burn wood or dung indoors. These places are not industrialised and any urbanisation will be shanty towns or slums. The current war on modernity runs the very real risk of causing real pollution and hardship much the same as the efforts of Trofim Lysenko to make genetics conform to Marxism.
I completely agree re’The current war on modernity’
So all attempts to improve air quality should be subjected to stringent cost/benefit analysis.
Nevertheless, the link between air pollution and vulnerability to the common cold/influenza is well established:
‘……several studies have found strong associations between COVID-19 transmission/mortality and high levels of air pollution (Xu et al., 2020; Yao et al., 2020; Coccia, 2020a). For instance, studies from different Italian regions show higher spread rates in northern regions that are characterized by higher levels of air pollution (Cartenì et al., 2020; Conticini et al., 2020). In addition, long-term exposure to pollution can indirectly increase vulnerability to COVID-19 by affecting the respiratory system (Berman and Ebisu, 2020; Conticini et al., 2020).’
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7499053/
Air quality, water quality in large conurbations require constant attention.
Having said that, your point above comparing 2019 numbers of respiratory deaths to those in 2020 is telling. A novel common cold coronavirus was no more reason to panic than any severe influenza variant.
It should be possible to make any necessary adjustments to infrastructure without affecting living standards/growth and certainly without pandering to the net zero nonsense.
On BBC Radio 4 in 2020 Nick Robinson interviewed a Ugandan nurse about the impact of Covid 19 there, or rather, the lack of impact. The nurse said how they thought they were going to be the next dead people but soon came to realise that this pandemic was not so deadly, at least for them. Nick asked if they were no longer scared then and about PPE and whether there was enough. The nurse explained that what stopped them being scared was not having protective gear. Anyway, the conclusion for why Uganda was doing better than the UK was attributed to life style and organic food. The ONS data for average age of death from Covid was 81 years and a few months above the UK life expectancy. Life expectancy in Uganda is 62 years. It would appear that the ‘superior’ life style in Uganda meant that people didn’t live long enough to be affected by Covid.
Looking at life expectancy in the various regions in Italy it seems the worst affected with Covid had higher life expectancy than regions least affected. In addition women were affected the most. Again, women’s life expectancy is around 85 while men’s is around 81. In addition the worst affected region was Lombardy which has the large city of Milan, and Lombardy has more people than any other region in Italy. Pollution is looking like a scape goat.
Out of interest here is that BBC interview. I find it interesting that Nick thinks Africa should be badly hit with Covid for no other reason than it’s Africa.
2020 June 1st. Here is a part transcript:
Nick Robinson (BBC): It’s not very long ago that we were told that the coronavirus pandemic could have a terrible impact on Africa, a continent that has suffered terribly from the effects of Ebola and AIDS, but so far it has not turned out that way. First the picture on the ground in Uganda. A country that has so far recorded no deaths from COVID-19. I’ve been speaking to a nurse in a General Hospital in the Rakai district of Uganda; Maria Nekalanda:
Maria: We really haven’t seen many patients of the symptoms of Covid. Like we have the measures in place, we do have the tests for outpatients that are coming in, but actually we have not recorded anyone.
Nick: So, is it turning out to be nothing like as scary as maybe you thought it would be a while ago?
Maria: Well, in the start we actually panicked. We were thinking, Oh my god, we are going to be the next dead people and it turned out that over time we stopped panicking and understood that probably this whole Covid situation is just not going to be as bad.
Nick: Are you saying that you’re no longer scared of COVID-19? And do you have all the protective equipment that you would want to have?
Maria: No, that’s actually a part of what stopped scaring us because for a greater part of the season we did not have protective gear. The health workers on the ground that are also handling general patients are not protected.
Nick: What about for the people who have this? You’ve seen people who get Ebola and how serious that is. How does Covid compare for them?
Maria: Comparing Covid to Ebola will be a kind of joke to the many Ugandans that have lived to see the impacts of Ebola, because people can deal with Covid 19 and they eat normally, they interact in communities, until probably they are found out and they are literally interacting with each other. That doesn’t happen with Ebola. Whilst there is an Ebola outbreak in the region pretection is at the very high pitch. People don’t keep running in at out of those particular areas. But for Covid you realise having Health Ministers come to places where Covid 19 is unchecked and Ebola is like 100 times worse.
Nick: Tell me about the lockdown in your area of Uganda or in Uganda as a whole if you like? What sort of lockdown is it and are people happy to go along with it or are they very frustrated?
Maria: People are actually frustrated because they have been financially affected. They’ve lost a lot in business. They are struggling to put bread on the table. They are like “well, you’re talking about a pandemic which I haven’t been able to go to work, why don’t you let me work?” So the whole lockdown situation is like a punishment.
Nick: Have you any theories why Covid is much less serious in Uganda than it seems to be in the UK for example?
Maria: I would think about the lifestyle. Ugandan’s they have probably access to more organic food. Lower cases of chronic illnesses like obesity. But um…we just think we have a bit of unexplained immunity to that disease. We are not dying just as bad.”
To reiterate, life expectancy in Uganda (and most of Africa) is about 60 and the life expectancy of most of the countries hit badly with C19 is about 80. This Flu type varient targets primarily the elderly. Whose idea was it to lock up whole nations and especially those of productive age?
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus the CCP appointed director of the WHO warned back then “no return to the old normal for the foreseeable future’ and “The virus remains Public Enemy No.1” and goes on about governments going in the wrong direction. He ends by saying “If the basics aren’t followed there is only one way the pandemic is going to go. It’s going to get worse and worse and worse and worse…”.
Is that so? What virus does that? I’m with the Ugandan nurse: “the whole lockdown situation was like a punishment.”
Great stuff. Thanks.
‘Pollution is looking like a scapegoat’
The main reason that I started looking at air pollution as an indicator of high covid mortality was because of my own personal experience of living in London and the consequent deterioration of my lung performance.
We know from the ‘smogs’ of the 50s in London that air pollution definitely increases susceptibility to respiratory infections. That is why we have taken measures to improve air quality in London. But you will still see soot on your vehicle after rain. You will still see the cloud of polluted air hanging over London from the air as you descend into Heathrow airport.
In my own area, the large city had a bad year for age adjusted mortality in 2020 but the surrounding rural areas, including small towns, did not.
Nevertheless, I entirely accept that covid 19 had no more effect on population mortality in the developed world than a bad influenza year.
As I have said, tackling pollution, particularly air pollution and the pollution of our rivers, must be a long term programme subjected to stringent cost benefit analysis, as must all environmental policies.
I live on the very edge of York, next to a river with fields beyond.
I wake up after rain to find my car covered with fine topsoil.
Should I panic?
I don’t think you need to panic about air pollution in York, population 200k.
Leeds, on the other hand, population circa one million, you probably do.
Probably no coincidence that anecdotal reports of serious respiratory illnesses in Leeds occurred from Oct 2019 onwards.
Spot on.
Midazolam. Morphine. Pillow over the face.
All paid.
All behind closed doors.
And yes ventilators murdered thousands too.
Flu death rate is not 0.1%. It is 1% for the wrinklies -same as Rona.
But thanks for playing.
Either way, just don’t call it a pandemic
If you’re lucky, you too will be a ‘wrinkly’ some day.
It doesn’t pay to be disparaging or dismissive.
Of course, you are correct. Being kind and diplomatic has much to commend it in any situation.
As not just a “wrinkly” but a “coffin dodger”, i have been subjected to dismissal and disparagement countless times this millennium, most notably when being the naughty boy pointing out that the Emperor’s scrawny arse is in plain sight, when considering the junk computer modelling and ludicrous assumptions and barefaced lies that make up the climate “crisis”. And the “extreme weather” hoax. And the “cheap” Ruinible Energy “solutions” to problems that (at very least) are ridiculously exaggerated.
“Denier” is the usual excuse for not even considering hard facts and measurements that point in a different direction. “Denier” from the same genius that describes coal trains as “death trains” and thermal power plants as “death factories.”
And I am told that I am “paid by Big Oil” (who must be sending my cheques to the wrong address, unfortunately.)
I now learn I am also “Anti-Vax”, despite never (until the last year or so) refused recommended treatment.
Now, I just receive the fashionable “Shut Up”, “We own the settled science” routine.
Sorry, I won’t.
And if that gives some venal, malicious politician, “scientist” or Grauniad reader hurty feelings, I’m delighted.
‘Professor John Ioannidis estimated the fatality rate of Covid to be around 0.4% in Europe and the Americas..’
Fast forward to the 37 minute mark in Prof J. Ioannidis’s 25-Oct-20 symposium presentation to hear his full assessment of the cvd19 mortality risk.
https://youtu.be/4XApZ3jSKQs
Hear the world’s premier epidemiologist explain that in every country and setting the risk was entirely a function of age and pre-existing illness. In frail-elderly institutional care, your risk of death from covid was not 0.4% but 25%. That’s a 1 in 4 chance. Half of all Cvd19- deaths, worldwide, were in care homes.
On the other hand, if you were aged under 45 and in good health, your
risk, to the nearest one-hundredth of one percent, was not 0.4% but 0.00% (that’s nil).
For all fit and well people aged under 70, the risk was not 0.4%
but 0.01% (one death in every 10,000 cases).
At the end of the above video, made in Oct-20, just before the mass jabbing began, Prof Ioannidis asked: ‘If an evil scientist forced me to choose between annual flu and cvd19, which would I choose? Well, if I were over 70 and already seriously ill, I would choose flu. But, otherwise, I would choose cvd19.
The risk from covid, unless you are frail-elderly or already very seriously ill, is nothing. Nothing.’
A couple of years ago, the University of Oxford published an online assessment tool, which I played with for a while. Various inputs one could use, but essentially age was a strong factor.
“Why was the NYC ventilator mortality rate so high?”
Why not ask Bear Grylls? He has a degree in Spanish and was in the SAS.
My Dad got secondary pneumonia after COVID-19. It took time though: it was 12 weeks after COVID-19 that he was so bad that he was hospitalised. Certainly, it was pointed out at the time that densely-populated, pollution-heavy cities had more sickness and worse symptoms.
I had extremely low vitamin D levels and had just started a six-month course of medication when I got the virus and was very poorly – three weeks in bed and another 12 before I could fill my lungs to capacity. We should do what they do in Nordic countries and fortify foods such as bread with vitamin D. My Mum has been taking vitamin D supplements for years due to having osteopenia and was shivery for about 24 hours before returning to normal, while my Dad and I were wrecks!
Across the board, the early waves of illness and death were because protocols about not putting infected old and vulnerable people back into homes from hospital were ignored. It gave countries nice, scary sounding death tolls to justify the disgusting lockdowns and restrictions.
Dr Brian Ardis testified in the Reiner Fuellmich Covid “crimes against humanity” trial that Anthony Fauci decreed to the US medical establishment that the only drug that could be used to treat Covid is the experimental, highly dangerous drug remdesivir. This was all part of the hidden in plain sight “plandemic”, done to ramp up the fake Covid death toll and create fear in the general public. For details search for Dr Brian at (browser search)
Joel Smalley substack, Reiner Fuellmich’s Grand Jury Court of Public Opinion: Covid-19 Crimes Against Humanity (2022)
There was the famous video by Dr Cameron Kyle-Sidell from a New York emergency ward early on in 2020 where he described COVID-19 as “a disease that does not make sense to us — a disease for which our usual treatment does not work.”
“Some are questioning whether this is a lung disease causing blood problems or a blood disease causing lung problems,” he said.
“I don’t know what it is, but I know that I have never seen it before. People are dying of a disease we don’t understand,.”
Kyle-Sidell has also said that “COVID-19 lung disease, as far as I can see, is not a pneumonia” but seems to be “some kind of viral-induced disease most resembling high altitude sickness.”
The use of force ventilation certainly killed many but was it as few as this article suggests?
Also, “A review in the Lancet of all 1,095 autopsies of Covid-positive patients in Germany found that 86% died directly due to the virus and 14% died with the virus as a secondary cause (or incidentally present).”
Were they using the correct protocol?
They are certainly not using the correct protocol for Covid jab deaths.
If they use Dr. Burkhadt’s Protocol for Autopsies which has a 93% detection rate they can tell whether the unfortunate death was caused by the experimental jab.
Ordinary autopsies won’t find the real cause.
What compounded the issue was the state of mind of many of the victims. To induce fear on the scale that was done would have compromised people’s immune system but could have induced many other symptoms that were psychosomatic, which could explain why there was what appeared to be no consistency in symptoms.
I read Klaus’ book on his uninvited and arrogant view of resetting and re-imagining the world, and I’m sure you are familiar with this viewpoint?
“A Great Reset is necessary to build a new social contract that honours the dignity of every human being,” added Schwab “The global health crisis has laid bare the unsustainability of our old system in terms of social cohesion, the lack of equal opportunities and inclusiveness. Nor can we turn our backs on the evils of racism and discrimination. We need to build into this new social contract our intergenerational responsibility to ensure that we live up to the expectations of young people.”
Kind Charles III is all ‘on board’ with Klaus.
Much was made of how bad the virus was and how we had to change the world and yet towards the end of his book is this:
Page 247 – Conclusion
“…the corona crisis is (so far) one of the least deadly pandemics the world has experience over the last 2000 years”. !!!!
‘This JAMA study… shows that the death rate for intubated Covid patients was 88%.’
Is that true? The abstract says: ‘As of April 4, 2020, for patients requiring mechanical ventilation (n = 1151, 20.2%), 38 (3.3%) were discharged alive, 282 (24.5%) died, and 831 (72.2%) remained in hospital.’
It would appear that the release of an virus that had been engineered to be highly infectious but not deadly was intended to bring about panic and then centrally controlled and globally managed health ‘care’. Bill Gates went on and on about the world not being ready for the next pandemic, and yet the many nations already had access to the accumulated medical knowledge and wisdom gained over more than 150 years and were absolutely ready. Also, there is less and less reason for there to be Spanish Flu type pandemics because the world population has grown while birth rates haven’t, indicating that childhood mortality has been decreasing, and that has been due to increased wealth that drives increased health. Perhaps the control freaks were panicked into creating a crisis because they were becoming increasingly irrelevant as more and more people were becoming independently prosperous and autonomous?
If the “World wasn’t ready” it wasn’t for want of Billy Gates chuntering on about coming pandemics for years.
Why he even held his secret Event201 just days before they started picking up the corpses of business men in Wuhan streets whilst the cameras rolled.
The rest of Event201’s “Projections” ( other than the date – 2025 instead of 2019/20) were “surprisingly” accurate. Perhaps he has a ‘hot’ telephone line to God? Or perhaps he’d been carefully planning something? He was “lucky” enough to have purchased enormous holdings in all the very best BigPharma firms as well.
I wonder if he’s related to Mystic Meg?
FDA gave authorisation to use Remdesivir from 1 May 2020 (even though the WHO said not to use it.) Were they using it in NY? I don’t know. I understand it causes multiple organ failure, and in the Lancet review of 1095 German autopsies quoted above,
The most common immediate cause of death was diffuse alveolar damage, followed by multi-organ failure.
Coincidence? I don’t know.
And then there was AIDs and the controversy around the allegations of deaths caused by the drug AZT. It so happens that ‘Dr’ Fauci was involved with this one too.
Ah yes. AZT. Killed many, many more than AIDs. Let alone HIV.
This is interesting:
“A new analysis suggests that a high percentage of people who required help from a ventilator due to a COVID-19 infection also developed secondary bacterial pneumonia. This pneumonia was responsible for a higher mortality rate than the COVID-19 infection.
So while COVID-19 may have put these patients in the hospital, it was actually an infection brought on by the use of a mechanical ventilator that was more likely to be the cause of death when this infection didn’t respond to treatment.”
A hospital acquired infection?
https://www.sciencealert.com/most-covid-19-deaths-may-be-the-result-of-a-completely-different-infection
This article does NOT invalidate the imaginary virus hypothesis!
What people never fail to understand is that in early 2020 Mass hysteria had, to a man and woman, infected the medical profession.
they honestly believed that they were witnessing a new virus because of their faith in the PCR and were letting confirmation bias control their reasoning.
There are many, many ways that insane doctors can kill people, Midazolam and ventilation being simply the largest and most noticeable.
But what about the man having a heart attack that doesn’t call an Ambulance because they are petrified of catching Covid? That’s a heart attack and an excess death and would have almost certainly have had Covid 19 written on his death certificate.
Or the elderly person in a care home who’s chest infection escalates to Sepsis because no doctor would visit the care home? Again, an excess death and again Covid written on the death certificate.
The deaths come in many forms iatrogenic, medical neglect, irrational fear and the effective withdrawing of medical services while the medical profession went on a wild Covid goose chase and none need be explained by a ‘novel’ respiratory virus.
Let’s not forget that the Number 2 risk factor for dying in hospital of Covid 19 was ANXIETY.
I repeat, ANXIETY.
( Underlying Medical Conditions and Severe Illness Among 540,667 Adults Hospitalized With COVID-19, March 2020–March 2021)
Yes, apparently a mental condition gave people a whopping 28% chance of dying from a respiratory virus in hospital. That’s bizarre.
But there is a simple explanation.
What it really means is that insane doctors were seeing people with a past medical history of anxiety coming into the hospitals (almost certainly holding their positive LFT piece of plastic) because they were petrified they had Covid 19. And when anxious get really anxious they have panic attacks and the major symptom of a panic attack is hyperventilation which can look identical to ARDS (Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome) or, the belief at that time, Covid ARDS.
Yes, in their madness, the doctors were ventilating panic attacks.
Eventually the hysteria abates, sanity returns and they stop killing people. They tell the public that the reason is the virus ‘mutated’ and became less deadly and no one’s the wiser.
Convincing us (and even the Daily Skeptic) that Covid 19 was a deadly virus (and not an imaginary one that existed only in the Doctors minds) is the way that they’ll wriggle out of it, as they usually do.
As Charles Mackay, the author of “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”, the bible of Mass Hysteria published in 1841 said:
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one”
Yes, doctors were even able to identify Covid deaths involved in motorcycle accidents. Pretty good diagnostic skills, without all the trouble of an autopsy or an inquest, or even examining the stiff!
Thank you for a very thoughtful and informative post. Having once in my life had a panic attack (induced by a doctor’s letter) I can well understand your assertion that anxiety is a very powerful emotion resulting in physical symptoms.
Doctors are represented as having priest-like attributes by many patients, they are not priests however, they are as emotional as the rest of us and they believed the propaganda too, unfortunately.
Do you follow Jessica Hockett @EWoodhouse7? She’s been deep diving the NYC 2020 springtime spike. https://woodhouse.substack.com/p/the-covid-death-reckoning
“It seems New York officials are trying to use non-hospital places of death as a way of minimizing or obscuring the fact that most 2020 excess death in New York City occurred in the spring and in hospitals. Why? Some independent analysts – me, Michael Senger – have suggested that much, if not all, of the excess deaths in NYC city hospital were iatrogenic. Without patient chart review by a respected third-party, or a class-action law suit, we’ll never know for sure. It’s worth considering who all might have an interest in Americans never knowing.
The new vital statistics reports do take baby steps toward honest ascertainment of causes of death during both that event, and the three-year “pandemic,” but the agencies either don’t grasp or don’t want to acknowledge how much of an outlier NYC really was, how deadly the policies & protocols implemented were, and what the magnitude of all-cause & covid-attributed mortality suggests about the validity of claims about SARS-CoV-2’s infection fatality ratio. No one can deny that New York City’s 11-week death spike in spring 2020 was a mass casualty event unlike anywhere in the world (though possibly akin to the Northern Italy experience).”
Serious point being missed here.
Coronavirus causes pneumonia, but it also causes a major upregulation of the immune system (inducing a cytokine storm), as indeed do other respiratory viruses. This results in all sorts of systemic changes including abnormal clotting, acute myocarditis etc, and these together with a breakdown in the alveolar walls which causes pulmonary oedema are why people die. Ventilation is the wrong thing to do. It cannot improve gas exchange if the lungs are full of fluid. What though kills people being ventilated is the fact that they weren’t being treated for the cytokine storm. It’s not the pneumonia per se that kills, but there has been insufficient post-mortem examination of anything other than lung pathology.
Differential death rates may be the result of genetic differences in susceptibility to developing a hyperimmune state or to differences between areas in the use of steroids to suppress this, or simply to developing differences in virus strains which alter the risk of hyperimmune state induction. Paradigm: rheumatic heart disease from streptococcal infection disappeared in the West when the bacterium changed so it no longer cross-reacted with cardiolipin. In less developed countries the original strain persisted and so therefore did the heart complications.
Quite. Pr. Denis Rancourt highlighted the disguised bacterial pneumonia epidemic in the US in 2020 being the underlying cause of death (for which Ivermectin was the preferred treatment given that all western Governments banned/restricted use of standard antibiotics).
This article can hardly be considered useful without any mention or consideration of age, induced stress or social isolation. The latter two are basic factors in Dr Sheldon Cohen’s (Carnegie Mellon) seminal work on susceptibility to respiratory diseases – this being one of the basic building blocks of the COVAX Psyop programme. Amazingly nobody pays attention to this.
“The first salient fact is that just 12% of NYC hospitalised patients were on mechanical ventilation as of April 4th 2020″
That just means that at a given moment, 12% of hospitalised patients were on ventilation. It does not mean that only 12% ever ended up on ventilation.
Indeed, it could be that every hospital patient who died ended up on ventilation. Imagine that every patient who died was in hospital for 8 days, of which their final day was passed on mechanical ventilation. In that case, 1 in 8 patients would be on ventilation but 100% would have died while on ventilation.
Which kind of undermines your argument.
Headlines such as yours are misleading. We all know ventilators were the absolute wrong treatment and both ventilators and remdesivir killed people. People were told to stay home until their lips turned blue and then come to the hospital. The elderly and younger population who developed pneumonia were denied antibiotic which would have cured their secondary bacterial pneumonia. It really wasn’t that hard to figure out. But in the USA hospitals were paid by the federal government to put people on ventilators and administer remdesivir. Will, I think this article you wrote is misleading and only adds to the dangerous misinformation we have had to swallow for three years.
Not sure you are right here. While some may have developed a secondary bacterial pneumonia, it wasn’t that that killed them. Th correct management should have been for everyone to have been issued with a pulse oximeter to measure their O2 saturation, and to go to hospital when this dropped below 89-91% – whereupon they should have had tests to confirm the cytokine storm and then been given steroids (and IL-6 blockade). Any wet lung (and coronavirus infection causes the alveoli to leak fluid, not because of infection but because of the inflammatory immune response) will get secondarily infected. The same “this was bacterial death” argument was used in the Spanish flu epidemic, at a time when viruses could not be identified and the concept of cytokine storm did not exist.
As I have said there are many things that provoke a cytokine storm, and the textbook by Cron and Behrens is illuminating both in showing that the signs and symptoms of Covid-19 are due to this, and that there was adequate therapy (steroids etc) before SARS-C0V-2. Part of the problem is that many physicians believed, and probably still do, that giving steroid to someone with an infection is wrong because it reduces the immune response, not understanding that that is exactly what is needed.
Another paradigm: if a patient with multiple sclerosis suddenly deteriorates it is 99% likely that they have a urinary of chest infection – but their stress response doesn’t work, so they need high dose steroids as well as antibiotics. Though this is counter-intuitive to what we are taught I saved a number of patients in this situation to the point that we issued a card to patients outlining the necessary steroid treatment to be shown to the A&E staff. Yet we found resistance to this was so high that unwarranted delay in giving steroids was commonplace.
It seems to me more deaths occurred in the early stages of the virus infection, because we didn’t know how to handle it or treat it. Lots of mistakes were made and some treatments were restricted because pharmaceutical companies didn’t want doctors to use cheap drugs that they couldn’t make a big profit from.
I can’t tell by the numbers presented, but I’ll bet NYC had the highest rate of Covid19 patients on ventilators of any state or country.
Maybe you people don’t realize, but the huge panic generated about the coronavirus in the first months created such fear that hospital staff was very leery about even approaching sick patients. They placed food trays near the very sick, but refused to feed them. They didn’t let any family members enter the hospital so no one knew that people were just being starved to death. A friend whose father died in April 2020 told me that she is sure he died of starvation. I read another account of a person whose father was hospitalized and they wouldn’t let family members in, so he disguised himself like a medical worker (which was easy with the hamzat suits they used to wear) and he saw how food was placed near the sick but no one would go near and feed them and they were too sick to do it themselves. A very great number of people died due to starvation alone.
Please read Jeff Childers substack May 15th 2023. Ventilators killed many.
https://substack.com/app-link/post?publication_id=463409&post_id=121555029&utm_source=post-email-title&isFreemail=true&token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo1NjQ1NTAwNSwicG9zdF9pZCI6MTIxNTU1MDI5LCJpYXQiOjE2ODQxNTM3MTQsImV4cCI6MTY4Njc0NTcxNCwiaXNzIjoicHViLTQ2MzQwOSIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.mk1mIck8AUZnWNixqLqFcQffdPM6_K8UA1KN8tHqIHk