Tag: causes of death

Grand County Coroner Raises Concern On Deaths Among COVID Cases

The Grand County coroner is calling attention to the way the state health department is classifying some deaths. The coroner, Brenda Bock, says two of their five deaths related to COVID-19 were people who died of gunshot wounds.

Bock says because they tested positive for COVID-19 within the past 30 days, they were classified as “deaths among cases.”

“It’s absurd that they would even put that on there,” she said. “Would you want to go to a county that has really high death numbers? Would you want to go visit that county because they are contagious. You know I might get it, and I could die if all of a sudden one county has a high death count. We don’t have it, and we don’t need those numbers inflated.”

The state health department says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention requires them to report people who’ve died with COVID-19 in their systems because it’s crucial for public health surveillance.

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New CDC Numbers Show Lockdown’s Deadly Toll On Young People

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) revealed Wednesday that young adults aged 25-44 years saw the largest increase in “excess” deaths from previous years, a stunning 26.5% jump. 

The notable increase even surpassed the jump in excess deaths of older Americans, who are at much higher risk of COVID-19 fatality.

Moreover, according to the CDC, 100,947 excess deaths were not linked to COVID-19 at all.

Since such young people are at very low risk for COVID-19 fatality—20-49-year-olds have a 99.98% chance of surviving the virus, per CDC data—it has been suggested that the shocking increase in deaths is largely attributable to deaths of “despair,” or deaths linked to our “cure” for the disease: lockdown measures.

Former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, one of the most vocal and earliest proponents of lockdown measures, admitted this much during a Wednesday news appearance.

“I would suspect that a good portion of the deaths in that younger cohort were deaths due to despair, due to other reasons,” admitted Gottlieb (see video below). “We’ve seen a spike in overdoses, and I would suspect that a good portion of those excess deaths in that younger cohort were from drug overdoses and other deaths that were triggered by some of the implications of we’ve gone through to try to deal with COVID-19.”

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COVID-19 Pandemic Paradox: 2020 Has Fewer Deaths Than Five Years Prior

Scientists in the United Kingdom have coined a new term: SARS-CoV-2 pandemic paradox. The term refers to the comparison between the mortality rate in the early months of the pandemic to the last five years during the same months. Researchers at the Warwick School of Medical collaborated with the Institute of Digital Healthcare, University of Warwick, to conduct a statistical analysis of death records for the last five years in England and Wales.

The time period studied started from the inception of the pandemic in December 2019 until the end of March 2020. Data was collected from the Office of National Statistics. Weekly deaths on average were taken into account during the study period. Researchers also looked into death rates related to respiratory illnesses and created a subgroup, since COVID-19 causes respiratory trouble in serious cases. Also, shortness of breath is one of the early symptoms noted in COVID-19 patients. 

Furthermore, the research took into account population growth and other individual trends for the last five years. Finally, the researchers found that national death rates had declined in the first four months of the global outbreak compared to previous years. Particularly, the months leading up to the pandemic that was declared on March 11 by the World Health Organisation (WHO).

It is important to note that the decline in mortality rate observed early this year was only in comparison to the past five years during the corresponding months (December to March). “We used government data in England and Wales to compare weekly mortality rates during the COVID-19 pandemic and over the previous 5 years. Death rates were elevated during each week of December 2019 excepting one and throughout the first half of January 2020,” the paper explained about the trends observed.

“However, since that time, there have been consistently fewer deaths each week compared with the average over the previous 5 years: the total number of weekly deaths dropped from 11,548 to 10,841 in mid-February and from 11,498 to 10,895 in mid-March,” the paper elaborated with statistics.

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