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:: tens of thousands of people die of covid everyday::

COVID conspiracy theorists: Bah the numbers are made up, they just report anyone who dies for any reason as a covid death. Fake news!

:: one person who already had severe allergies and a heart condition dies from the COVID vaccine::

Also COVID conspiracy theorists: OMG see the vaccine is deadly an more dangerous than the virus, it is a legit threat and has a microchip in it!

@freemo I have a friend who is way too deeply into that :(

@wa__em too many people are. The problem is the government legit broke a lot of trust while simultaniously fear mongering the topic (one that warrents some degree of natural fear regardless)...

The end result is no trust and a lot of fear to go around. That tends to manifest in all sorts of unusual ways. One of which is conspiracy theory nonsense.

@yaksha

Headlines like this are so dishonest because they rely on people not understanding statistics.

If everyone gets vaccinated, and the vaccination is 99.9999% effective, you would be telling the truth to say "100% of all new covid cases are vaccinated people"... but despite being true it is highly manipulative since people dont understand that it isnt really saying anything of value, its just meant to sound scary and say nothing.

@wa__em

@yaksha

It wouldnt be a vaccine, but how is that relevant? Neither the news article you posted nor my own example, presents a condition where a vaccine has zero effect... In fact as I stated a vaccine could be 99.9999% effective and you could still see 100% of people who get the virus having been vaccinated. The wording is simply constructed to be confusing and cause people to misunderstand what is being stated (hint, it is not stating the vaccine is ineffective in any way).

@wa__em

@yaksha
Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine says, “Ideally, you want an antiviral vaccine to do two things... 1st, reduce the likelihood you will get severely ill & go to the hospital (aka personal protection), 2, prevent infection and therefore interrupt disease transmission (aka R0).”...Moderna’s chief medical officer even admitted that, “Our trial will not demonstrate prevention of transmission.” noagendasocial.com/@noagendash
@freemo @wa__em

@freemo @yaksha @wa__em Interestingly, this still paints a pretty poor picture of vaccine efficacy though…

61% vaccinated, 57% fully vaccinated, so vaccinated people are only slightly under-represented in the cases. Obviously there are all sorts of confounding variables (like people who estimate their risk of covid exposure being more likely to get the vaccine, etc) or important things beyond infection like disease severity, but at a glance, doesn’t seem great…

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-vaccinations-tracker.html

@ademan

the devil is in the details.. you cant draw any meaningful conclusions by just looking at national vaccination rates. You'd have to do a proper study on vaccine effectiveness, which ultimately shows relatively high rates, even on the delta variant (which it has 88% - 94% efficacity on depending on the vaccine you get).

@wa__em @yaksha

@freemo @wa__em @yaksha I’m glad you posted this before I shared my calculation based on those numbers heh. I did skim an efficacy paper and I thought that was precisely what you did though, you look at your case population and compare it to the wider population to calculate to what extent a population is over/under represented in the case population, and from that you get a relative risk?

odds_ratio_vaccinated = (vaccinated_cases / vaccinated_pop) odds_ratio_unvaccinated = (unvaccinated_cases / unvaccinated_pop)

relative_risk = or_vaccinated / or_unvaccinated

efficacy = (1 - relative_risk) * 100

?

I only ever took the one undergrad stats course, was mediocre at it, and promptly forgot everything, so I’m happy to be corrected.

@ademan

Your logic isnt too far off, the devil though is in the details.

For example, whats your sample size? How were the sampled from the population? Was it double blind randomly checking members from the population or inferred by just those who show up in a hospital? What about the people who got sick but were so minor they never went to the hospital? etc.

The simple numbers we can run on the back of a napkin is fine and all, but it isnt a replacement for a properly run study.

@wa__em @yaksha

@js290

the probabilities are how risk is measured, risk is how we quantify consequences.

@ademan @wa__em @yaksha

@js290

If youa re asking that question then you are missing the point.

@yaksha @wa__em

@freemo touche... the fact that you aren't also "misses the point"... "people not understanding the statistics"

“Statistics isn't about discovering correlations, it's about eliminating coincidence." -Nassim Taleb #RWRI
@yaksha @wa__em

@js290

"the fact that you aren't"

I'm not? I ask that question all the time, and work pretty heavily with that question.. It simply wasnt relevant to the point being made.

“Statistics isn't about discovering correlations, it's about eliminating coincidence."

Exactly, which is why all the science on this topic which has passed peer review does exactly that, not just look at correlation but have quite a bit of procedure designed to eliminate coincidence. In fact I elaborated on a small snippet of that already in the thread.

If you think im missing some points, by all means, feel free to explain it. But you seem to talk in sound bites and links so as to avoid any critical interpretation; not much I can do with that honestly.

@yaksha @wa__em

@freemo it comes down to two things 1) personal protection, 2) R0 & to what extent the various interventions addresses 1) & 2), respectively. If we agree no drug is 100% safe & effective, then the vax is likely a short term placebo for most people w/unknown long term effects. If vax reduces severity, they can claim success, but not contracting COVID also eliminates potential severe symptoms.
@yaksha @wa__em

@js290

If we agree no drug is 100% safe & effective, then the vax is likely a short term placebo for most people w/unknown long term effects.

This statement makes no sense to me. Why would something that is <100% effective, for example something 99.9999% effective suddenly just be a placebo?

@yaksha @wa__em

@freemo It's a placebo because the patient believes it works. Did the patient have natural immunity? Would they have had mild reaction had they caught the virus? How do you measure whether a patient's immune system has been primed for covid pre & post vax?

IIRC, placebo is 33% effective, better than most drugs they're tested against.
@yaksha @wa__em

@js290

What the patient thinks isnt where the statistics come from.. we dont figure out how many people with vaccines get infected anyway by going "hey buddy do you think you have covid". Moreover placebo effect (which can in fact cause real physiological protection and isnt just a mental state) is tested against, its the whole point of double-blind studies.

So no, that is completely nonsensical, we already adjust for placebo effect and measure actual infection rates compared against placebo to insure a vaccine is truely effective.

None of that of course requires a vaccine to be 100% effective either.

@yaksha @wa__em

@freemo @wa__em
Government and media have been working their ass off to break trust of anyone who is capable of even a single genuine thought.

So now, everyone has to make their own research on the topic. I don't blame people who on their own decided that the jab is safe, but damn, there have been so many lies about the topic, one would have to make his own long term AB testing just to be sure.

@lain how so? people arent dying in large numbers from the vaccine (though there are fair criticisms of it all the same), so it really cant work in reverse.

If you just mean that the general public seems to underplay some of the vaccine concerns, then yes, I do agree. Bias is a bitch like that, both sides will underplay their own concerns. But its not exactly a symetrical thing when deaths from vaccine are a small fraction of that from COVID and it overall seems to largely save more lives than it costs by a huge margin.

@freemo in the sense that a lot of people were talking about how bad the covid death numbers were when most of the people dying from it had extreme preexisting conditions and were very old. The anti vaccine people are doing the same thing, ignoring that most of the vaccinated people are old and not very healthy.

Either way, here's a study of the vaccine situation in Israel and if it's worth to do it (for the masses) or not: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-393X/9/7/693

@lain Not exactly the same for an important reason though... quantity.

For anything that has any potential to kill anyone on any scale you will always find that the infirm will be the disperportionatly represented majority. It should be obvious why someone who is already sick is more likely to die of anything remotely possible of causing death than someone who is healthy.

It isnt about the fact that people with covid or people getting vaccines are more likely to die with pre-existing conditions. Its the fact that with COVID your hundreds of thousands of times more likely to die than from a vaccine.

In other words, throwing a fit because a very small number of people die with preexisting conditions is not equivalent to throwing a fit because huge numbers of people die, of whom a large proportion had preexisting conditions. Basically the odds of dying are so astronomically higher from covid than the vaccine that you cant compare the reactions to the two as being equivelant.

@freemo the paper I linked has a calculation of that and the difference is not exactly astronomical. Another big issue is that from the vaccines it's often young people who have complication while with covid it's the opposite.

Just to be clear, I support the vaccination of risk groups, but mass vaccinations of the whole population are a different thing.

@lain I have been rather vocal that the vaccine is risky since it didnt pass long term safety trials. So I too agree that, for now, one should probably only get the vaccine if at high risk and wait another year or so to see how safe they turn out to be before jumping in.

That said everything ive seen till now clearly shows the vaccine is a much lower risk than the virus.. though some vaccines are safer than others (AZ has shown some nasty side effects so probably not a good first choice).

That said, I will review the study you posted when I get a chance and see if it changes my view on some of my statements.

@freemo taking precaution with both the virus & the vax are both rational & compatible
Deep Dive - CoVID-19 mRNA Vaccine Safety and Alternatives
aproposofnothing.substack.com/

@js290 Yes they are. I am not against caution for either. But the level of absurdity coming from the anti--vaxxers is still laughable.

@freemo well they count any death with a positive PCR result as a covid death, so its fair to call any death with a positive vaccine as a vaccine death. :blobcatshrug2:
@freemo at one point they even had a couple obvious gunshot inflicted deaths registered as covid deaths. it was hilariously bad.

@icedquinn Except they dont, that is a complete fiction. The cause of death is listed with respect to if a doctor has reason to believe the disease contributed to the death, period.

Now you could always find some anomalies in the data (and this is why many studies will acquire their own data rather than rely on a third-party reporting). But by in large, no, this isn't in line with the reality.

@freemo i had medical contacts tell me they had a hard time finding bodies come across their desk that *weren't* labelled as died of covid.

@icedquinn Then you have either poor sources or sources working in very unusual circumstances. My career has me working with quite a few in the medical community from doctors to nurses and when this topic has come up not a single of the dozens of different professionals have ever said anything that reflects what your saying now.

@freemo @icedquinn Here in Colorado after a report of an obvious non covid death (a gunshot victim I think) being included in covid deaths they clarified that the numbers meant deaths of people WITH covid, not DUE TO covid. I think at some point this expanded to people EXPOSED to others who had covid.

I have very little confidence that the governments pushing or reporting these numbers are going so consistently or accurately.

Now, whether a gunshot victim with covid died before or after being vaccinated shouldn't change whether that death is counted as a covid death. To discount numbers only on one side or the other seems clearly problematic.

@SecondJon

Im sure there are lists of people with covid who happened to die. That has little tondo with global list of people who died from covid however. Those lists are exclusive to people whose cause of death is covid.

@icedquinn

@freemo
On this topic you may be putting to much faith in those reporting the numbers, which includes a lot of politics a lot of inconsistency and not a lot of transparency.

A 30 seconds web search verified what I had remembered. Colorado had been reporting as covid deaths those who didn't die of covid and changed its numbers only when caught.

"The story involved a 35-year-old man from Montezuma County who died May 4 of alcohol poisoning but whose death was counted in Colorado’s COVID-19 death toll."

“We have been reporting at the state, deaths among people who had COVID-19 at the time of death and the cause of that death may or may not have been COVID-19,” Dr. Eric France, the health department's chief medical officer...

It would be nice if what you said was true, that these lists were unrelated and had little to do with deaths reported as covid deaths, but that's verifiably false just here in my state where they got caught. You have confidence that everywhere around the world the doctors and political forces responsible for reporting these numbers are accurate, honest, and globally consistent? Really? Even with this story proving that not to be the case?

Over the last few weeks I have confirmed with several work colleagues in India that they are having family diagnosed with covid (several of whom have Died From Covid) with no covid tests at all. So they're covid deaths, though without any kind of test to indicate such.

But back to the original topic, that Coloradan who died of alcohol poisoning, his death should be considered a covid death or not regardless of his vaccination status. In just putting out a request for consistency.

foxnews.com/us/colorado-lowers

@SecondJon So I did some research and seems your interpretation of them reporting bad numbers and only admitting it was "all people with covid" when cause is inaccurate.

Not only were they open from the beginning about what the numbers they reported meant, but they had consistently recorded two sets of numbers even before the incident, one for all people dying with covid, and a second for people dying OF covid. However because the public went wackadoo when they heard there was a list for just people with covid who died, and tried to sell it under the conspiracy theory here, they have abandoned/modified that list.

Here is a quote from a colorado doctor I found in the colorado sun talking about the issue:

"At issue here are two different systems for reporting COVID-19 deaths, CDPHE leaders said. One — the one with the higher numbers — is an epidemiological surveillance system that tracks deaths of people diagnosed with the disease. The other — the one reporting lower numbers — is the more mundane recording of causes of death on death certificates by county coroners, doctors or medical examiners."

Later they go on to explain why. Simply looking at the numbers of all people who die with covid, and specifically the delta against baseline, allows for live up to the second monitoring of changes. If there is a difference in numbers of people who die with covid in % vs people who die without covid, then we know the virus is getting worse or better. So it is an important number to collect for up to the minute monitoring.

As for the numbers on people who die of covid, which was maintained but also separately, for that there is a significant delay. Those numbers will lag by months. So while useful in its own right it isnt useful for making up-to-the-minute decisions.

So yea, as expected, the whole thing was mis-reported and of course fox news is, as usual, guilty of bad news.

@freemo

So here in Colorado we all were daily watching the official Colorado department of health state wide numbers go up and up. Then one day there was a big drop. Not just to total numbers, but daily numbers on past dates. That's when we found the state had been keeping two sets of numbers and the official report was based on deaths with covid until that point. Then they switched out which set of numbers were officially reported.

You and I both agree that's not how things should be. So I look at this and it clarifies my perspective, reality does not align to my assumptions. You look at this and just deny the reality, and call me a conspiracy theorist and attack the name of the website that quoted the government leader who explained the change.

Well, OK then. When the response is calling me names because I belive my lying eyes rather than your assumptions, the conversation has lost value.

We'll interact better again on other topics, I'm sure.

@SecondJon

First off, what names did I call you. I did not call you any names. I also didnt call you a conspiracy theorist. I did refer to the general public as acting that way, not you. You happened to (by the looks of it) get duped by watching a very low-quality news report from a questionable news agency and thought it was true. My assumption was you had bad information that was the result of how the general public and fox presented it. My hope would have been (since i dont see you as a conspiracy theorist) your response would be "oh shit, glad you clarified, food thing to know FOX was wrong. The fact that even after FOX news was debunked and corrected you still think the conspiracy is valid is on you, but I couldnt have known that before you responded.

Second, to the point itself... So you and everyone in colorado were looking at the wrong list of numbers, you should have been looking at the list of numbers for deaths due to covid... You could perhaps blame whatever media you watched for that.. but its hard for me to see what the problem is. The numbers were reported correctly for what they were, that much is clear and documented. You were looking at the wrong list for what you thought it was, the correct list was being maintained and you simply didnt follow it.

Part of that is because you were looking at (or wanted to look at I should say) the day-to-day numbers, which dont exist for the "deaths due to covid".

@freemo Like I said, we were looking at the state department of health official numbers covid19.colorado.gov .
Of your argument is that the Colorado government from which we were directly getting information was pushing bad data, then are on the same page.

I don't believe men become angels when they become bureaucrats, politicians, or even doctors.

Just like a person writing a media report can convey false information, so can governmemt officials.

I took another 30 seconds to find another news source reporting, hopefully the liberal Denver Post isn't as triggering as a fox affiliate link.

denverpost.com/2020/05/15/colo

Here's another, also not fox.

coloradoan.com/story/news/2020

I'm surprised given previous discussions at how this interaction has gone. My only point is that it's reasonable to believe the data isn't accurate/consistent/unbiased /complete, but we should strive for consistency in how we choose to interpret it.

@SecondJon

I cant view either of your links, they block me from viewing those pages (since i dont accept cookies or ads).

> Like I said, we were looking at the state department of health official numbers covid19.colorado.gov .

I'm sure you were, and as the quote from the doctor involved with the numbers stated, they were the official numbers of everyone who died with covid. This wasnt hidden or distorted from the public, it was literally written as the standard used for the numbers you were looking at.

Live numbers for deaths due to covid lag by a few months, so they do not exist accurately as live numbers, so you werent looking at that.

> Of your argument is that the Colorado government from which we were directly getting information was pushing bad data, then are on the same page.

No they werent pushing "bad data"... they were reporting exactly what they said they were officially reporting in the feed you were watching. That is, deaths of people with covid. It is a standard measurement and the only measurement we have that is live.. It is "good data" just not the data you thought you were watching apparently.

The government was in parallel, as we covered, also reporting deaths **due** to covid. That data was also good, but not being live data by its nature it isnt what is reported for day-to-day decision making.

> Just like a person writing a media report can convey false information, so can governmemt officials.

Of course, but they didnt. What colorado did **IS STANDARD** you and the rest of the public just didnt understand or were mislead by news agencies that werent careful with their wording, nothing more.

@SecondJon Look what your missing is, I spent a lot of time as a Data Scientist doing COVID data.. every single state has two lists.. one of COVID caused deaths (this lags a few months) and a second of deaths of all people who have COVID..

Your state had both these lists just like every other state did.. Both were maintained, both were active, and anyone who was educated knew which of the two lists they were viewing (I cant speak to the accuracy of how your news reported it).

No one lied, no one misreported.. you just thought you were looking at one list and were looking at the other.

Here is an article that reinforces what I’m saying:

kmov.com/news/colorado-coroner

To quote the article:

The state of Colorado classifies COVID deaths in two ways: A death due to COVID, where it was the underlying cause, and a death with COVID, where there was a positive test but it wasn’t listed as the cause of death.

This was reiterated when the whole hoopla kicked off as the article points out with the commissioner saying:

Today, Colorado’s reporting 4,156 COVID deaths, these are actually deaths among cases. Then they show 3,230 deaths due to COVID, and so they’re differentiating that, but I think it can maybe go a little further and I think the policy could be changed,” said Richard Cimino, Grand County Commissioner for District One.

@freemo yes, that article from 7 months after they adjusted the number is different. Same state, same calendar year (barely), but different topic.

I'm tired and probably irritable, unrelated to this thread, so really trying to not be bombastic or anything here. Bear with me if you will.

My comment about Colorado was that there was only one set of numbers being presented by the state, which included anyone who died while having covid regardless of cause of death and when it hit the news that the only reported numbers included car accident deaths, Colorado changed how it reported.

You at first seemed to write off the idea of that kind of list... I'm sure it exists but it's not really relevant. Now I read you saying that of course it exists, it's super relevant, there's always and forever been two, and anyone who is educated would never think otherwise.

Here's one more source for you to read or ignore.

_____
DENVER (May 15, 2020): The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) today explained the way it has been counting deaths among people with COVID-19 and announced an addition to data reporting going forward. 

CDPHE explained that to date, its data dashboard included deaths among all people who had COVID-19 at the time of death. This included deaths caused by COVID-19 and deaths among people who had COVID-19 at the time of death, but the cause or causes may not have been attributed to COVID-19 on the death certificate. This is the standard way states report to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). 

Going forward, the state will present both numbers: Deaths among COVID-19 cases and deaths due to COVID-19.
_____

This is all I've been saying.

They changed how they reported the numbers after media reports about non covid cases being included in what this link says was the only list being pushed out AND saying it's not just Colorado but that every state was reporting to the CDC. Then this site says the state CHANGED how the Colorado government would report, to BEGIN distinguishing between the two lists.

Is this fox news? Some wild conspiracy theory website from the dark web?

covid19.colorado.gov/press-rel

I'm glad they did the right thing on May 15, publishing both sets of data. For the first time. But that's not a conspiracy theory or a bad media source. It's the state directly.

Side note : I just read through the slide deck linked by that article. Covid as a probable or presumed cause even without any laboratory confirmation are included in the official death by covid ICD-10 code. That's interesting, but really, at all knew there weren't enough tests for a long time ago the numbers had to be presumed to some level.

@SecondJon I think you are missing the point.. all states are required by the CDC to keep both sets of numbers, one of all people with COVID who died, one with people who died of covid. This is a standard, every state has had to do it.

You can go to the CDC and **See** the numbers maintained for both lists for every state including colorado, and you can see both lists as maintained since before they were "caught"

So all you are really saying is that before they were "caught" they displayed one of those lists, after they were "caught" they displayed both lists.. but even your own quote you just shared says "presented", not that they will start keeping both lists, only that both lists will be presented on their dashboard.

I'm not sure why it isnt clear that this is a non-issue. They didnt put both lists on their dashboard before a certain date (but kept both lists as the CDC required), then later they added the other list to the dashboard, nothing more nothing less.

@freemo Yes, of course they couldn't update the official covid death numbers for past dates without having a separate, previously unpublished data source. All along this is what I've been trying to communicate.

The only officially published numbers until last May included deaths presumed to have been caused by covid and deaths not presumed to have been from covid.

I'm glad that we now have both sets of numbers.

Still, many of the numbers are subjective, not objective. A covid caused death is a covid caused death whether there's any laboratory confirmation that a person had covid. If for no other reason than we know there were not enough tests avaliable at different times in different places, so some had to make a presumption. That's the best we have and we can work with that.

@SecondJon It seems your issue isnt really "officially published numbers" but more so "What numbers were published on the public facing website"

Remember the existance of two lists means both lists were also published. Perhaps not on the colorado website for the general public. if you had went to the CDC website you would have found both lists before they were "caught".

The point here is not that the media (or even the states official media) didnt screw up in how they passed on information to the public. The point here is they never lied or hid the real numbers, they were always published publicly in earnest.

@freemo oh. Right. Yes, I'm referring to numbers as they're communicated to the public. We can't really blame the public for running with the only information made avaliable to them, right?

@SecondJon

Well the media tends to dumb down everything. So im not sure I entierly blame them. Keep in mind this is not unique to colorado. In almost every state if you were seeing up-to-the-day data you were view the "all people who died who had covid" numbers. Now I will totally agree that the fear mongering aspect of this is that the news never bothered explaining the difference between these two lists or the **real** meaning of the numbers. But then again, the general public that still relies on the news are the ones who probably cant or wont understand such things.

If you want facts and understand its best to avoid the news in general (and I'd say this reflects that)... but my point is, the numbers scientist and researchers use are inflated, we get the good numbers, we know the difference, and the CDC makes it clear what numbers are which.. its just the general public tends to be clueless and the media tends to be useless.

@SecondJon Oh and to be clear on this point:

You at first seemed to write off the idea of that kind of list… I’m sure it exists but it’s not really relevant. Now I read you saying that of course it exists, it’s super relevant, there’s always and forever been two, and anyone who is educated would never think otherwise.

Yes I was trying to writeoff their existance as a pointless tangent.. they exist, but have no relevance to the fact that there is also the list of people who die of covid.. the fact that many agencies keep a second list of people who die who happened to have covid is not particularly damning… keeping such an additional list is not a bad thing. There are different lists of that nature

@freemo yep, agreed. That's why it was a problem when the state was only publishing on their official covid data website what you call a pointless tangent with no relevance! Glad they fixed that.

@freemo both covid and vaxx are probably not that dangerous. But I am not crazy to intentionally get covid. Neither am I crazy to intentionally get injected with the jew juice

@freemo

I am vaccinated and am fine

I think that people are definitely doing to the vaccine what they did with covid when it first started. People all thought it was a Chinese bioweapon. But then it has such a low mortality rate for young fighting age people that it would be the worst bioweapon ever created. It was just a SARS mutation.

The vaccine isn't a eugenics program or microchips, its just a bullshit placebo at best since it doesn't actually make you immune.

@freemo I'm glad to be fully vaccinated. RTA Type 1 and fatty liver put me in a high risk pool. When it first started coming had already had a kidney stone stent surgery to prevent sepsis. My body naturally produces kidney stones.

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