CDC reports of historical Covid deaths drop by 70k to correct “coding error” | Hacker News Reader

CDC reports of historical Covid deaths drop by 70k to correct “coding error”

boriquagato.substack.com

13 pointsverisimi8 comments

my bet is that you drop the count by another ~70%

You think by now, we could stop with this kind of rhetorical question. A 10% correction which makes data align better with surplus mortality is fine. Arguing that 70% of the data don't deserve to be counted as covid deaths when we have surplus mortality and that's even taking a bad flu season into account (we haven't had 700k deaths from flu since 1920)

I want to be super rude: is this guy both numerate and logical because .. I have my doubts.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-excess-mortali...

For comparison, excess mortality due to a bad flu period:87,000 deaths, 1957-1960 (3 year window)

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/33119...

So 2020 alone, 470,000 excess deaths in the USA.

If you want to revise covid mortality down 70%, supply a rational basis for the surplus deaths.

The story here is not one guy's opinion of what the real numbers might be. The real story is the confirmation that CDC has significantly revised child fatalities from Covid downwards, and instead of announcing it widely (to temper fear), they quietly added a vague footnote to their data, with the hope that nobody would notice the revision.

70k not 0.70.

Did you read the article? I quoted it above: the 70k is the CDC revision which the author lambasts and says he thinks a 10% revision could well be "hiding" (my words) a 70% revision.

Not directly linked but the number of weird substack posts I see here prompts this thought:

Feels like any publishing system that takes a 10% cut on subscriptions is going to naturally trend towards the production of spam.

Is there any clever workarounds for this? Some kind of distributed trust network? Some game theoretic way to constrain a business to only produce socially useful content?

The error would probably have been caught sooner if the CDC had not been intentionally hiding data from the public for so long..

Blue Team source - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/20/health/covid-cdc-data.htm...

Red Team source - https://nypost.com/2022/02/22/cdc-withholding-covid-data-ove...

It's going to be fascinating seeing how this who episode was handled once the dust settles.

Any facts will be buried in layers of historian's justifications and prejudices. See for example "When did the USA know about German Death Camps in ww2?" ... People were disregarded when they tried to tell others what was happening, and they're still called conspiracy theorists and spies for having done so.

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