Comment by desine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by desine | Hacker News Reader

I live in California. I got laid off in December of 2019, right before the pandemic. I got a small gig that held me over for a bit, but fell behind on rent. A few months ago I got a new job and caught up on rent. If I had taken care of some other past due bills first, I would be essentially getting a few thousand extra dollars for being irresponsible.

I’m frustrated. I’m frustrated we shut down the economy for so long. I’m frustrated we knew the infection and death rates were exaggerated by faulty PCR testing and financial perks for hospitals impacted by cases they could attribute to COVID.

I want to help the less fortunate. Plenty need it, including friends of mine. But somehow I feel slighted by this. Some of my neighbors in my building were posting rent strike signs on the walls. I never supported that.

I don’t like this, and I don’t like that I don’t like it. A 0% loan for the renters would make me happier, but that wouldn’t solve all the issues.

I’m already looking to leave the state. I don’t like where my tax money has been going or the regulations that have been pushed here. I was born and raised in California and it saddens me how it’s changed recently.

> I’m frustrated we knew the infection and death rates were exaggerated by faulty PCR testing and financial perks for hospitals impacted by cases they could attribute to COVID.

You can be frustrated without making up claims. Infection and death rates were not exaggerated. Death rates were higher initially due to the ramp up in proper treatment. Infection rates were subject to selection bias which skewed the denominator early on in the pandemic.

I’m not making up claims I’m repeating what doctors and nurses have come out and said - they were told to mark deaths as COVID related if the patient had a positive test result, even when cause of death was not specifically COVID related. Many “whistleblowers” (a bit of a stretch since it is not fraud or illegal) have spoken out on this. The CDC changed the policy of an asymptomatic patient’s positive PCR test counting as a a “case” in January of this year. Now, symptoms or multiple positive tests are required. This is hard fact not some spurious claim.

We can go back and forth about what constitutes a "COVID death," but if you look at excess mortality for 2020/2021 you will see that if anything, we are under-counting COVID deaths.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

I'm not sure what you're trying to say about the false positive PCR tests in asymptomatic patients, but false positives in PCR tests are rare and would barely impact the numerator.

> they were told to mark deaths as COVID related if the patient had a positive test result, even when cause of death was not specifically COVID related

What's "specifically Covid related"? If a cancer patient catches Covid and takes a turn for the worse, it's fair to call Covid the cause of death. Did a sudden surge of people with asymptomatic Covid die in car crashes and cause LA to run out of crematoria capacity in January and February?

The unbiased way to look at it is excess deaths, since Covid was the only new major cause of death last year. Going by that, about 40k people died of Covid in California in 2020, or about 0.1% of the state's population.[1] The actual number is probably higher than that because flu deaths are way down in 2020 due to Covid countermeasures. And California had about 5k flu deaths in 2019.[2]

1. https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/01/27/40000-excess-deaths-i...

2. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/flu_pneumonia_mort...

You are making up claims, it is incredibly obvious if you spend even a little bit of time looking at the data that deaths and infections were underreported, not overreported. Stop spreading blatant misinformation.

Of course in some cases deaths were misreported as being due to COVID. And there may have been a financial incentive in some cases. But the impact of that is orders of magnitude less than the number of deaths and infections that were missed due to low testing.

Just look at the number of excess deaths. The picture is pretty clear.

The issue with claiming that the pandemic caused these extra deaths is that we don't know if it did.this is because the reactions to covid (lockdown) could have just as easily impacted people dying.

It's not so simple so as to attribute all excess mortality to covid.

Of course, that on its own is not enough to prove that all of the excess deaths are due to COVID.

But when you have the count of COVID deaths, and they more or less match up with the number of excess deaths, I think it's a reasonable conclusion. Sure, there are excess deaths not accounted for and we can dig into those, but overall, the numbers match up.

There's a bit of Occam's Razor here, too. We have an explanation with numbers that match up quite nicely. Yet, due to the politicization of the pandemic, you have claims that "we don't know for sure" or worse yet, alternate theories with absolutely zero evidence to back it up. I'm open to hear theories, just as long as there is data to support them. I haven't seen any.

If you look at the number of excess deaths, it is abundantly clear that COVID deaths were underreported, not overreported. There is no reasonable debate around that issue.

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