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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I am sure our Ukrainian correspondent will be along shortly to offer his most gracious apologies.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/pact-future-planetary-technocracy-global-crises-global-corporatocracy/5864483
I posted this earlier in the News Roundup. A long article but it does provide a wealth of information on what Global Government is all about.
It’s the biggest risk we face by far because by its very nature it is not accountable to anyone- they can’t be thrown out. That’s obviously the appeal to these people- that and the God complex. If you were a politician or “leader” of some kind you’d quite fancy a succession of well paid sinecures that the voters couldn’t sack you from
… and worse, there will be a one size fits policy throughout the world, so no way to compare and contrast other ways of doing things nor judge how well we are doing. It will be a dictatorship of do as we say or else.
Yes the point about comparisons is an excellent one
It’s a question of value to us. While there are obvious, and less obvious, benefits from a degree of global standards, excessive enforcement of them can be inimical to the concept of innovation and ensuing benefits.
I do not believe you fully understand the grotesque, wholly encompassing nature of the Totalitarian endeavour. It is not a world we would want to live in. Think 1984 plus worst nightmare. On steroids.
I don’t want global standards. I want accountability. I want to be able to sack who it is that governs me, and cause to be sacked people working for an organisation I fund if they don’t deliver what I am paying for. Anyway, do you seriously think that the people who are pushing world government are concerned with “benefits” from “global standards”?
Quite. I think some people are still making their way to what’s it’s all about though. And once you get there it’s such a brain-f*ck that the easiest thing to do is to reject it as plausible.
Wow, you’re clearly just not getting it
The idea of global governance is to force all nations to work cooperatively and in unison, as expressed by institutions such as the UN or EU. But such wishful thinking does not really materialize, as typified by exactly these institutions.
Governments, whether global or national, are run by politicians. Politicians are people who strive for recognition, live for publicity, fight for leadership, and are driven by a need to exert power and decide over others – in other words, in general, the worst of society!
My father used to say the best Prime Minister would be the one that had to be dragged screaming into office. A successful businessman will prefer to continue in business. Anyone enjoying a satisfying profession will prefer to remain in that profession. Nobody ‘in their right mind’ wants to become a politician.
Clearly, there are politicians whose ideals are to serve and better society – Andrew Bridgen comes to mind – but there is a clear danger that a majority, especially if unsuccessful in their chosen career, may wish to serve and promote some contemporary ideology, particularly if convinced the population is too ignorant to recognize the ideology’s supposed importance.
Thus large populations can easily be coerced to succumb to ideals which little interest, let alone benefit them: globalism, uncontrolled immigration, DEI, climate change, forced medical interventions, commercial sanctions, wars.
In my opinion, we need a better selection process for politicians if we wish to achieve better governments.
I think we also people to be a lot more cynical about politicians, and to expect a lot less from the state in return for the state getting out of our lives as much as possible.
Absolutely. The head of Germany’s Foreign Office (and leader of the Green Party) is famous for once saying that peace negotiations with Putin were unthinkable as long as he did not change his course by 360°, which had the Russians rolling in the aisles (she obviously meant 180°). It was not a slip of the tongue since she repeated 360° twice more. How can Germany’s chief diplomat and leader of the country’s foreign policy be so lacking in basic education?
“The Covid lockdowns are of course the paradigmatic example of this [very foolish public policy]”. How myopic! Covid was a cruelly-calculated, globally-coordinated hoax, a “plandemic, clearly judged such by Reiner Fuellmich and his large team of experts in their 2022 model trial on Covid-19 Crimes Against Humanity, see https://metatron.substack.com/p/reiner-fuellmichs-grand-jury-court.
The alleged global threats to humanity asserted by the globalist establishment are not real threats at all, they are confected threats with the ulterior purpose of wrecking western economies and forcing the people into serfdom via digital straitjackets.
The main threat to this country is the United Nations which is at the centre of all our oppressions, be it the climate change hoax via its subsidiary IPCC, fake “plandemics” via its subsidiary WHO and mass immigration via its subsidiary IOM. We need to talk about withdrawing from the UN and all its evil works.
Our current situation is, let us not forget, a continuation of the C1984 Scamdemic within Agenda 2030, and in this country we are now being pushed very aggressively towards complete societal breakdown and civil war.
If those Deagell forecasts are right…Christ!
To paraphrase a 20th century revolutionary: Who will free us from government?
The bricolage of the functioning of government-as-activity being like the strands of subterranean micro fungi that link every tree in a forest to every other.
Have the globalists considered that there might be a religion that still conceives of the world in spiritual terms? One that has, in some expressions at least, an ambiguous view of the ‘laws of kings’.
Our government is working for Satan.
Great Article———-But who gets to choose this Global Government? —-The answer is NO ONE. It is a Technocratic Coup by the Liberal Progressive (Communist) blob. Capitalism that brought prosperity to half the world is to be replaced by Marxism with the Technocrats in total control of all the wealth and resources.
Are the capitalists – who want us to be slavish consumers – and the marxist technocrats – who want a minimal slave population to do their dirty work – truly aligned? Surely the conflict between the desire for consumers and the desire to preserve the planet for themselves is something we can exploit.
Good point. I would though argue that we haven’t had experienced genuine capitalism for a while now. We appear to live in an age of corporatism rather than capitalism.
Government-as-activity that spans the globe is akin to the pantheistic idea of the spirit of God as the sole force that animates everything.
Any news on how the WHO plan to choreograph a monkeypox scare into the US elections? Or is a new Covid variant ready for release?
The Monkeypox scare got laughed out of court. They’re now working on Bird Flu.
We used to have Government by consent; that is what democracy and the peaceful transition of power represented. We used to have policing by consent.
Now we have neither.
We effectively live in a Dictatorship of detached and self-selecting Elite, both Globalist and National. And the only way they can retain control is to operate a Police State. That is what we are becoming.
We are already in a Police State. Harry Miller is clear on this and I have a lot of respect for his focus on that topic. See his recent interview on the Together channel:
https://www.youtube.com/live/CIQabx8oO8Q
You just need to read H.G.Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come, published in 1933, to understand what’s going on.
It’s all there: technocratic government by “experts”, control of population through pandemics, elimination of national identities and religions, and a limit on the global population to 1 or 2 billion.
It even mentions the year 2030.
When you read around the literature, it’s very interesting to see how often this date pops up. As well as being baked in to the UN’s Agenda2030, it was mentioned by Keynes, and just the other day, by Elon Musk:
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1820799076310352124
The big irony is that with Wells it’s never entirely clear whether he was writing a blueprint, a warning, or a satire, or actually all three at the same time.
Definitely another way to bypass democratic systems of government.
Just as we have seen with all the woke and DEI nonsense which none of us voted for.
Excellent article – thank you.
When Michel Foucault describes the emergence of the state in early modernity as being, in essence, an epistemological or metaphysical phenomenon, is he referring to a postmodern or a rational epistemology? Given his status as a leading postmodernist, I guess the former, in which case, given that ideology’s disdain for logic and evidence, and for reality and reason, we should be wary of his analysis, to say the least.