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Putting the Corona Virus Numbers in Context

category international | rights, freedoms and repression | feature author Sunday April 05, 2020 23:11author by 1 of indy

The current shutdown of the economy and lockdown of society all around the world is unprecedented and it is very clear that the media are talking up the number and trying to instil panic and fear in the people. This is true not just in Ireland but everywhere else. What all the media reports have in common is that not a single one of them puts the numbers into perspective. All we see are league tables of infections and deaths for this country and others and how it is all going to get worse.

Update: The common flu causes up to 5 million cases of severe illness worldwide and kills up to 650,000 people every year, according to the World Health Organization


THIS IS HUGE: Stanford’s Antibodies Study Wraps Up, Shows Covid-19 Is 50x More Prevalent and 50x Less Deadly Than Believed
https://youtu.be/jGUgrEfSgaU

The purpose of this article is to introduce some rational discussion of these numbers and show how it all relates to each other.

Regular Yearly and Daily Deaths in Various Countries

So for example in the case of Ireland the headline screams today (Sat 4th Apr) 17 more deaths and 331 new cases for a total of 4,604. Anyone following the news will know this daily death rate has risen over the last week or so and 17 people is quite alot and brings the total so far to 137. So now we will put this in context.

Consider a country with a population of 100 million and in it, there are an equal number of people at each age group. And lets assume the number of people born is more or less the same as the number who die. This would mean a growth rate of zero percent. We know most Western countries have a growth of anywhere from 1% to 2%. So now assume most people in this country live on average for 100 years. In fact the average expectancy in Ireland is 81.5. But lets stick with 100 for now. Then if you only last 100 years this would mean in a population of 100 million that each year (which is 1% of 100 years) that 1% of the people die. Well 1% of 100 million is simply one million. Therefore the number of people who die per day is 1,000,000 / 365 or 2,739 people per day. Now applying this logic to the USA with a population of approximately 331 million means 3.3 million die a year or 9,068 deaths a day. Italy has a population of 60m. This would then be 600,000 per year or 1,643 per day and for Ireland with a population of 4.9 million, the above would suggest about 49,000 deaths per year.

The above 'model' is fairly crude since the shape of the population curve is not uniform and people don't live to 100 on average. However it is surprisingly close to the actual figures and within 20% or so. Here are the normal deaths on a regular year for a sample of countries.

Normal number of deaths per year and day for selected countries
Country Population Deaths / year Deaths per day
Ireland 4.9 million 31,116
(in 2018)
85
U.K. 67.8 million 616,014
(in 2018)
1,688
Italy 60.4 million 610,645 1,673
Spain 46.7 million 474,523
(in 2018)
1,300
USA 331 million 2,813,503
(2017)
7,708
China 1,439 million 10.5 million 28,800

It would be a reasonable bet that few people realized that on average 85 people die every single day in Ireland. When you realize this then the 17 does not seem so catastrophic and earth shattering. But lets dig a bit deeper. In the report from the www.hpsc.ie for Apr 3rd where up to that point there were 113 deaths, here is the breakdown of death by Covid-19 by age. Unfortunately though anyone over 65 is in one age bracket and we have to question why they didn't continue the 10 year age brackets. Is it to hype the numbers and make it seem that the risk at death at 65 or 66 seems higher than it is. From RTE news reports it says the median age of today's reported deaths is 77 -that is of the 17 today. This is quite close to the average life expectancy of 81.5.

Covid-19 Deaths by Age Profile

Update 2: The Italian government has released the percentage of deaths by age group and that works out at 99% over the age of 60 or 83% of all Covid deaths over the age of 70. And please see Important Update below as only 12% of these deaths may actually be cause by Covid since most of these people had other life threatening illnesses
Update 3: Up to 99% of people who died in Italy from Covid had other underlying conditions and very likely many of them would have died if not immediately, very soon afterwards

Age Group Number of Deaths
< 5 0
5 - 14 0
15 - 24 0
25 - 34 2
35 - 44 1
45 - 54 1
55 - 64 6
65 + 103
Percentage of Deaths by Age Group in Italy due to Covid-19*
* see Important Update box below
Age Group Percentage of Deaths
60 - 69 16%
70 - 79 35%
80 - 89 42%
90+ 6%
Total 99%
In other words 99% of all deaths were people over 60!

Yet another point is that the figure of 81.5 for average life expectancy is for both males and females, but the separate figures are 83.4 for females and 79.7 for males and one of the strange things about the virus is that far more men die of it than women. Going back to that media age of 77 this is noticed it is reasonably close to the average age of men. It seems like if you are within a year or two of your average life expectancy for your sex and you came down seriously ill with Covid then you are in real danger.

If one looks at the normal distribution on any given year by age, not all the people who die on a given day are either 83.4 if female and 79.7 if male. The two charts below from the Central Statistics Office show what it looks like. This really means that you have to include deaths of 'younger' people by accidents, suicide and diseases like heart attacks and cancer but you can still see that they still make up a smaller portion of the daily body count.

An interesting question then is of the 17 Covid deaths today who had a median age of 77, should these been added to the regular daily death rate of 85 people or is there some overlap? The chart below suggests overlap. Having said that no-one wants to die even one day before their time.

featured image featured image


In the current climate of fear and panic, people don't like to listen to anyone who questions the official narrative in any way. A common argument put forward when the above facts are presented is that 'yeah but young people are getting it and have died'. Well yes that is true, but so is it true that young people get cancer and die. The argument is really used to just shutdown debate and try make you out to be some sort of callous creature.

Now that these numbers have been put into a bit of context, when we hear for example 700 people died in a single day in Italy which is really broadcast to scare the pants off us, we can see the 700 in comparison to the 1,618 that die on a given day is not so end of the world. It is high though but again the same characteristics of the age profile is likely to occur.

At this point in the discussion, the people who are most frightened and righteous minded are shouting but that's not the point it will go exponential and we have to lock down to stop it.



Important Update 1: Italy

It looks like Italy which is the epicentre of the scare where it is important to hype the numbers to scare us all has massively talked up the numbers on deaths.

According to Prof Walter Ricciardi, scientific adviser to Italy’s minister of health, the country’s mortality rate is far higher due to demographics – the nation has the second oldest population worldwide – and the manner in which hospitals record deaths.

“The age of our patients in hospitals is substantially older – the median is 67, while in China it was 46,” Prof Ricciardi says. “So essentially the age distribution of our patients is squeezed to an older age and this is substantial in increasing the lethality.” [Note by Indy Editor. Median age is lower in China.]

But Prof Ricciardi added that Italy’s death rate may also appear high because of how doctors record fatalities.

“The way in which we code deaths in our country is very generous in the sense that all the people who die in hospitals with the coronavirus are deemed to be dying of the coronavirus.

“On re-evaluation by the National Institute of Health, only 12 per cent of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus, while 88 per cent of patients who have died have at least one pre-morbidity – many had two or three.”

So in effect they are re-categorizing all the regular people who die of cancer, heart disease, flu and everything else and saying they are dying of Covid-19. That is why the numbers are closing in on the normal daily rates. What this means is that we have to suspect everything including what are the tests actually testing.

Important Update 2: The Consequence of the Low Number of Flu Deaths Last Year

At any given time there is always a certain fraction of people who are dying of some underlying disease and do not have too long to live maybe of the order of a few days to a several months. Each year when the flu season comes along, it is these people who often succumb and they are swept up by the virus and constitute a vulnerable population in which to take hold. This is because people in that state of health with their immune system very low are especially at risk. However last year the number of flu deaths was down everywhere in both Europe and the US. This means therefore that the pool of vulnerable people that normally die were available this year to the Corona-virus and so this goes along way to explain the legit deaths that did occur and in Northern Italy which has a particularly old population this explains why it appear to affect it so much although the point raised above that probably only 12% should really qualify for death by Covid still stands.




Predictions, the Economy and Human Life

Switching to the UK a few weeks back Neil Ferguson at Imperial College (Ref 1) who was advising the UK government was predicting 500,000 deaths in the UK. A very high figure indeed. Incidentally he has since changed his view and says the NHS will be just about able to cope and reckons the death rate will be around 20,000. Both terrible figures especially when they are not put in context. But they are now. Checking our table above, we see 616,000 deaths by year in the UK. So if Covid-19 is primarily killing those (and not all) who are within a year or two of the end of their live, we can see where this figure of 500k comes from. It is more or less all the deaths of the year compressed into one. What is never stated is whether this is 500,000 extra deaths. It is probably a very significant overlap.

Returning now to the crisis there are a few key points which we are all aware of and most people will agree;

Now we are told we had to do this in order to save human life. And it is true human life matters. So why then have most governments underfunded health care for years. Why did the Conservatives in the UK gut the number of beds after the 2008 crisis considering now the UK is at standstill and the costs will far exceed any bailouts to the rich? In the case of Ireland we should ask Fine Gael, why did they let the Vulture Funds in and through other measures ramp up the number of homeless to 10,000 of which about 3,000 are children. Why was people with special needs and those on low income the ones who were hit by huge cutbacks during the crisis since it affected them badly? Why is so much junk food allowed and people's health to grow worse and obesity rates to soar. Why has a sugar tax been resisted and so on.

We hear that in hospitals in Italy and elsewhere doctors have to make tough decisions like giving respirators to young people instead of old people. Does this not contradict things abit. I thought it was mainly old people dying as the stats for Ireland and Italy show. Sure there are many more in ICU than dead. So in essence everyone agrees a young life is more valuable in the sense it is not yet lived. But the evidence clearly shows that they don't really care about the young people as in this country we have just shown 1/3 of homeless people are kids and the rest are probably in their 20s, 30s and 40s. Surely your risk of mental and physical ill health are sky rocket when you are homeless. Do you have to get Covid-19 and then they care. Building social housing for them all would cost a lot less than this crisis is costing. And people forget than literally 10s of thousands of social houses were built in this country where we were dirt poor in place like Crumlin, Kimmage, Finglas, Ballyfermot and all around the country. There are a lot of inconsistencies as you can see. Yet I can still hear the chant in the background 'exponential', 'exponential'.

A few words for the UK and the USA, if human life matters so much why did they knowingly go to war under false pretexts in which hundreds of thousands of died, millions injured in Iraq and so forth and where they wasted trillion which could have been used for health and education for improving the life of people in their own countries. It seems odd they have now stopped their precious economies all of a sudden.

And a few words for India. Population about 1,352 million people. The country is in lockdown because they care too. Yet hundreds of million live in dire poverty anyhow. For example there are slums with millions in them all over Mumbai none of which have proper running water or sewage. The biggest one called Dharavi has 900,000 people living it. No sewers! And the India government is worried about them. It would be interesting to see the life expectancy of those people, child mortality and so forth.

Comparison with Flu numbers

It is therefore time to look at some other similar scaled disasters. First off Covid-19 is NOT the flu and is a new novel strain of a SARS like virus. It should be noted that any comparison with flu is met with anger and people are simply not allowed to discuss it and Covid-19 together. Maybe the reason for that will be clear in a moment.

The flu season normally lasts around 100 days or so and goes from mid-November end of February and by that is meant the bulk of the infections and deaths. This does not rule out that people can get it in the summer. Last year was a good year in UK and Ireland. Flu deaths were way down. When people get the flu and become seriously ill they quite often get pneumonia -the same complication that Covid-19 people are getting. It would appear most cases of pneumonia -up to now -are triggered by the flu. The flu virus itself kills not too many but pneumonia cases are nearly always considered as a result of flu and that is why the national statistics always have a category for influenza related deaths. This means technically people who are said to have died of flu didn't really die of flu but of pneumonia. This is the exact same case as for Covid-19. Many are those dying are dying of pneumonia and the death certificate is marked as death by Covid-19. That is reasonable enough. This means when counting flu deaths we can include pneumonia because they are counting them in as death by Covid-19 when a Covid-19 patient dies of pneumonia. However we do know that in all countries new directives were issued to doctors and other medical staff that were promoting very liberal practices for how to categorize a death as a Covid death to the point that if the doctor thinks it is Covid and no test is available, then they can mark it as Covid. In the climate of fear and paranoia many will not risk their career to write anything other than what is expected of them.

So how many people died of flu in Ireland not last year but in other years. Answer according to a press release from HSE (Ref 2) issued on Oct 1st 2016 they say:

The flu vaccine is a lifesaver because flu can be a very serious and sometimes deadly disease, with potentially 1,000 flu related deaths in Ireland during a severe flu season....

They quote this figure because they were trying to get people to take the vaccine. If we go to CSO figures for influenza related deaths these are shown in the table below which were pieced together from the published Excel sheets for death by cause for the years 2015 to 2017. The format was slightly different each year so the tag line is added for each year to show what it was.

Number of Flu Deaths in Ireland
Figures from CSO
Year Influenza Related Deaths
2015 1,199 (Influenza and pneumonia)
2016 1,127 (Influenza and pneumonia)
2017 1,147 (Influenza and pneumonia)

As we can see this tallies with what the HSE said in their press release. The chart below shows the number of flu infections for the given week of the year and this will automatically correspond with the number of deaths. In other words the bulk occur in the flu season. There is one thing which appears to be out of alignment and that is in the Annual Epidemiological Report from http://www.hpsc.ie covering flu, they seem to only count the direct flu deaths and do NOT include the pneumonia caused by flu and therefore come out with lower numbers. Since it was difficult to get a graph of deaths for Ireland, we will use one from the data for the US, which shows the number of deaths per week for the time of the year from 2010 to 2018. All that is being illustrated is the way it peaks and it will be the same everywhere.

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So accepting an average figure of 1,000 death on an average year and if we assume 100 days for the flu season for the sake of simplicity, then that works out at 10 deaths per day. Up to yesterday that was not far off the same death rate as so far from Covid-19. The panic crowd are now praying that the exponential curve kicks in to prove this article wrong.

But to finish up lets dig out the flu death rates for the UK. Again last year they were really low so here they are for previous years taken from the UK government publication called: Surveillance of influenza and other respiratory viruses in the UK Winter 2018 to 2019 and from their Table 7 on page 51. One assumes they are using the influenza related deaths which is flu + pneumonia. If 1,100+ people die in Ireland and UK has a population 67.8 / 4.9 = 13.8 times larger then we would expect around about 15,180 deaths in the UK. It seems all flu deaths are estimates anyhow because not all of the people die in hospital.



Number of Flu Deaths in UK
Season Influenza Related Deaths
2014 / 2015 28,330
2015 / 2016 11,875
2016 / 2017 18,009
2017 / 2018 26,408
2018 / 2019 1,692

The first thing we see is the estimate extrapolated from Irish figures is not far off and second the new estimate for the number of deaths now suggested by the advisor to UK government Neil Ferguson quoted above of 20,000 deaths is very close to normal year of flu deaths.

So if this lower figure pans out in the UK and lets assume the death toll in Ireland goes from the current 137 today to say a massive 500 or half the normal number of flu deaths, does the question not arise why has the world economy been put in shutdown and literally hundreds of thousands of companies around Europe and the rest of the world driven to bankruptcy along with millions of jobs?

To finish off we can say the flu death rate in Italy with a very similar population to the UK must match it. In Ref 3 below which links to a study of flu deaths in Italy over 4 seasons from 2013/2014 to 2016/2017 it estimates 68,000 deaths. That works out at 68,000/4 or 17,000 deaths per year. This is in sync with the UK.

We are finally ready to publish the league tables we have seen so much of except this time, we will put in the flu deaths along side the Covid tallies so far and suddenly the world does not seem so frightening. It does raise the question why have in previous years it's pretty much okay for so many to die of flu but this year it is all out global panic. You can probably hear this: It's a new virus and its exponential and this is only the start of the big curve and a lot worse is to come and young people are dying... or so they say.

There is also something odd about the respirators. We seem to be given the impression that they are need for the younger people like those in the 30s, 40s and 50s but the reality appears to be is that older people are on them given what doctors are saying. The impression that it looks like they are trying to make is that only for the lockdown preventing the surge we would ran out and these younger people who die and they are more like you and me. It is sort of implied if this got out of hand -i.e. no lockdown, then we would all become seriously ill and die. Its implied. The authorities are really working for you and your safety. Funny though the way there are just so many reports in all the affected countries where doctors and health care workers are being sent into the frontline without proper or insufficient protection equipment. Do they really care about them.

Country Covid-19 death tally
so far
Influenza Related Deaths (average)
Ireland 137 1,100+
U.K. 4,932 11,000 to 28,000
depending on year
Italy 15,362 17,000
depending on year
Spain 11,947 No figure but with population of 46m estimate is 13,000 year
USA 8,407 Varies from 3,000 and 49,000
China 3,318 Unknown

So What is Going On ?

The real puzzle is why in China where 10 million people die every year or 900,000 a month and yet in the month of January or so, 3,318 died from Covid-19. That works out at 0.36% of the regular monthly total. Here's the clincher, either:

Indeed the amount of financial debt in the world runs to trillion and trillions and if we could derivatives then it is really off the scale in quintillions. Nothing was fixed after the 2008 crisis and the debt has only got bigger. But the richest and most powerful in the world already have so much. In their position money surely does not count and only power does. With the rise of high tech and the surveillance state, the West must surely have been looking jealously at China for the past decade or more admiring their highly effective almost total control of society especially with constant monitoring and awarding of social credits which are sort of the new currency in China and plays a role in determining what you are allowed do.

You see by making use of a real infectious virus that is killing some people but is not Black Death in scale yet until iteration 2 if this round doesn't do the trick, the game plan whatever it is, is global in scale and being rolled out that way. The vast majority in government and authority are just being carried along by the momentum and some are enjoying their new found powers but there are much bigger forces at play and the world media all of which is owned and controlled by the most powerful are the real drivers of the show. A few very frightening things have been learnt so far:

This and more will be teased out in a follow up article.


Don't worry it is just a bad dream. Really people shouldn't worry. It is just like what the authorities everywhere say it is. They are looking after you and when this is all over they are going to clear all your debts and make the world right. There is certainly nothing sinister going on and that is just a crazy conspiracy. So just shut the f**k up and go back to not thinking above your station.

References:

Ref 1a:
Scientist behind 'gold standard' model that predicted 500K deaths in UK (and 2 million in US) admits he was off, now says there will be 20K or fewer in the UK
https://www.theblaze.com/news/scientist-predicted-500k-deaths-now-says-20k

Ref 1b:
Neil Ferguson now says 20,00 death
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2238578-uk-has-enough-intensive-care-units-for-coronavirus-expert-predicts/

Ref 2:
https://www.hse.ie/eng/services/news/media/pressrel/annualseasonalfluvaccinationcampaign%20.html

Ref 3:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1201971219303285

Ref 4:
https://www.msn.com/en-sg/news/other/chinese-foreign-ministry-spokesman-tweets-claim-us-military-brought-coronavirus-to-wuhan/ar-BB118d8G

Ref 5:
https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/62-people-own-same-half-world-reveals-oxfam-davos-report

Caption: Video Id: p_AyuhbnPOI Type: Youtube Video
In this video subtitled Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg calmly points out the gaps in understanding and provides sober analysis


Caption: Video Id: jGUgrEfSgaU Type: Youtube Video
THIS IS HUGE: Stanford’s Antibodies Study Wraps Up, Shows Covid-19 Is 50x More Prevalent and 50x Less Deadly Than Believed



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