Excess Deaths revisited


Posted On: Saturday - June 4th 2022 8:58AM MST
In Topics: 
  Healthcare Stupidity  Kung Flu Stupidity



There was some good discussion on the Kung Flu death numbers under our Collective Soul song post a week back, initiated by commenter Dieter Kief's linking to a video interview of French-Canadian Denis Rancourt. (As I wrote there, if the commenters here want to just cut/paste their comments into the comments for this post, that would be fine and indeed helpful.*)

Peak Stupidity will revisit today the issue of "Excess Deaths" due, supposedly, to the Covid-one-niner. Besides a re-iteration of our old posts on the aging factor and my distrust for the numbers due to that, I will bring up other factors, including the biggest, which is the influence of the PanicFest itself on healthcare, as discussed by Mr. Rancourt in his video interview.

Due to my laziness and my trust for the accuracy of Ron Unz's facts here**, as highly opposed to his opinions, let me just paste in his quick sequence of yearly American death counts, the starting point of any discussion:
2014: 2,626,418
2015: 2,712,630
2016: 2,744,248
2017: 2,813,503
2018: 2,839,205
2019: 2,854,838
2020: 3,384,426
2021: 3,470,219

Notice that the numbers were relatively stable until the Covid outbreak, when they suddenly jumped by over 500,000 in 2020 and 600,000 in 2021.
Well, stable, OK. There are going to be increases as the population both increases AND ages pretty quickly. I wouldn't expect a straight 20,000 more yearly, as there are bad years and good years. Barring wars, those bad years for deaths are the times when there are bad strains of viruses around, like this one.

Sure, though, the numbers look bad. The idea of looking at "excess deaths" is very simple. No matter what people normally die of on average, if 1/2 a million more people died in '20, it had to be from something. One may bring up that, hey, how come there were only a couple of hundred flu deaths this year when normally over a hundred thousand, so, BS on the Covid count. Yeah, but if over a hundred thousand deaths were actually the regular old flu, there are still 1/2 million more deaths anyway, which we'll just attribute to the Covid-19, because, well what else was it?

There IS more to it, though. A lot more was going on the last 2 years than just this virus, the biggest being the PanicFest DUE (purposefully, I'm sure) to this virus and the changes to healthcare practices from this PanicFest. We'll get to this, in due time...

Before discussing that, what had bothered me about these numbers, as seen on the graph above, for example, is that the accelerating average age of the American population did not seem to be taken into account. This - the alleged flat-lined (other than seasonality) "normal" death rate - bothered me enough to get me to download .xls files and do spreadsheet calculations. Believe you me, I have to be pretty damned bothered to do something extreme like this!***

The problem I saw was that the CDC wanted to use a 5 year average for this normal death rate. I wanted to see how it'd be if you take this aging into account better. Right about a year ago, in Hey, what's the deal with excess deaths, anyway?, I looked at the very simple idea, arithmetically, that if you take the numbers of Americans in different age brackets, and multiply them by the also-"normal" death rates at these ages, you should get this normal-year rate. It increases yearly, so long as there's not a big virus that year, haha. I came up with just over 100,000 "normal deaths" higher than what the '15-'19 average would have given for the year '19. In '20, people were that much older on average again, and health problems do not go up linearly with age, when you get on up there.

Now, after the writing of that first post, our Mortality Addendum has some important numbers that I'd missed. After all that calculation work, I realized that buried in notes under their graphs, the CDC had the yearly death numbers (such as Ron Unz's). There's were higher, but again, it was the trend that was not correctly accounting for aging.

There was discussion of the cause of the discrepancies in absolute yearly numbers in Back to the excess death count - Could it be infants and illegal aliens?. Those 2 factors are almost surely the culprit as:

a) I had interpreted the "1-5" year-old category as meaning from birth on. No, it doesn't work that way, as infant mortality is kept track of differently. This accounted for 20% of the discrepancy.

b) Illegal aliens easily explain the rest. They die. Their deaths go in the stats. Their existence in this country, as we just got done discussing this week, does not. Many will not be counted in the census due to worries about being noticed in the system (haha, not bloody likely though) or due to their lack of participation most of our society in general.

OK, well that was a longer summary by far than I had intended, on this first factor, the errors in the "normal" rate of death. Let's move on.

How about this vaccine? Well, first of all, none for me, thank you very much. As much as the risk vs. benefit from this vaccines sounds like the worst for any I've ever heard of (and it doesn't prevent you from getting the sickness!), I don't think deaths due to the vaccine itself are a large portion of these excess deaths. There is the initial 2-weeks-after-vax scam, a plain accounting/statistics scam, that Peak Stupidity learned of from blogger El Gato Malo ("The Bad Cat") and discussed here. Any problems, up to and including death, seen in a person vaccinated within 2 weeks, were chalked up to the disease, not the vaccine. Well, that's pretty bogus. El Gato Malo gave examples but did not have a good number for us to use here. All in all, I'd say vaccine deaths are not a big factor, so far, but not insignificant either.

Then, there are the factors that are only semi-related to the PanicFest that Mr. Steve Sailer has written dozens and more dozens of posts about ****- that would be the additional murders of (mostly) black people due to the retreat of the cops from their ghettos and then the increased traffic death rate as of late.

Regarding the 1st one, I don't know the answer to the question, was it really about the LOCKDOWNs and guys penned up inside playing video games who got free and wanted to play in real life, or was it just coincidental with the timing the George Floyd stupidity and ginned up riots and looting due to that? I will say that I disagree with Mr. Sailer's stated premise (as in the article linked-to below) that officials were just wrong about curtailing the policing. No, they were not wrong, but they were cowardly. They saw the black political scene and the worship of that worthless reprobate George Floyd, and they didn't have the guts to fight against the policies that they knew would result in more crime.

The 2nd factor is the driving deaths that have had a pretty big uptick over the last year and a half. I'll admit it right here - I enjoyed being able to drive on wide-open roads during that PanicFest era. I appreciated not having cars parking in the show-off lanes. However, not all can handle it so well, and when the (bad?) cats are away, the mice will play. This is definitely a factor of the increasing sloppiness of society, which started with the economic devastation arranged for America as part of the Covid panic.

I didn't find the quick numbers on iSteve posts just now, but I recall that each of them, the murders and the driving deaths, would amount at this point to a low 5 digit number. Let's say the total, even after more of this, amounts to 25,000 deaths. No matter what the cause, these are excess deaths compared to other years, are then not?

How about additional suicides and drug overdose deaths that were really deaths from despair? (That's a Steve Sailer-coined term, I think.) Maybe that's another 10 or 20 thousand? Maybe more?

Denis Rancourt is on the right. They spent the first minute figuring out how to pronounce his name. ;-}



(I didn't get the name of the Aussie guy doing the interview - at least he's not doing this while driving down the highway.)


Now, lets finally get to the points raised in the videos and other sources that Mr. Kief and Mr. Hail (more so on his blog) have raised. I believe this last part is the most important, as the numbers, though hard to arrive at accurately, must be the largest. Put it this way, many people have died in the last 2 years due to the PanicFest itself, not the Covid-19!

A majority of Americans do not live healthy lifestyles. Their diet (OK, OUR diet, it used to be) is probably the biggest factor in this.***** The healthcare industry has greatly expanded over the last few decades both due to the aging of Americans (as an average) and the unhealthiness. I may criticize the business end of American healthcare, as it IS a complete shitshow due to long-term government involvement in all aspects, but the technology that has been developed is still impressive. During this PanicFest we are barely over with now, 2 1/4 years later, lots of both the preventative care and the acute care were put on hold.

Thanks to the wisdom of our Founders, Federalism has meant that some locations panicked at lower levels than others. In the worst of places, say New York City, the Communist/Totalitarian impulses of government officials, along with Tower of Babel population there****** got lots of people killed. In others, say Florida, with a decent Constitution-understanding Governor, a more normal life of healthcare could occur. (That is especially important in Florida, where there are lots of old people for whom going to the doc is the entertainment for the day, at least until the Early Bird Special starts ...)

I would hazard a guess that in the best of areas, the PanicFest resulted in a 3 month curtailment of the entering of healthcare facilities for important procedures, while in the worst of areas it was well over a year. What happened during that time? Well, what didn't happen? I'm talking standard EKGs and heart stress tests for electrical and vascular heart problems, colonoscopies looking for emerging polyps, standard "board" blood draws to find out-of-the-ordinary ionic or molecular numbers that indicate possible organ problems, as far as preventative medicine that didn't happen. Then, as far as actual procedures that fix problems, stents didn't get put in, drugs (yeah, I know) were not prescribed, polyps were not cut out, or whatever else ya' gotta do... I don't want to even have to think about this stuff, but that's why those guys are doctors and I'm not.*******

How many Americans died earlier, with a much longer period of life lost than those FROM the Covid-19, due to the lack of both preventative care and the long wait, maybe too long, to get procedures done? People were used to a 1st-World medical system, but that quit for a while. There were plenty of political and monetary incentives - see Are Kung Flu death counts being goosed for insurance reasons? (After-the-fact spoiler alert: Of course. There was every incentive to do so.) - to log deaths as being FROM the Kung Flu. All you needed was some kind of symptoms and maybe a positive test by some point. They would all be "excess deaths", but more of them may have been from the PanicFest than the virus itself.

We don't know this ratio. All we know is the number of "excess deaths" that occurred in '20 and '21. Will someone be able to back out afterwards the deaths that were due to the suspension of 1st-World medical care for months to over a year? Do the people in authority WANT to know?

Let me paste in something from one of Mr. Hail's comments:
Early on, many people including me were trying to find signals of first-order Panic-induced deaths---those deaths caused by the Corona-Panic phenomenon, the most obvious example being non-treated heart-attacks by people terrified by Panic-pushing media to seek treatment. There was indication already there were more of those than genuine "Covid"-caused deaths, and it being just no-contest in quality-life-years-lost terms.

Panic-induced lost-life-years clearly exceed Wuhan-Coronavirus-induced lost life-years in the US population. The grim battles (or non-battles) over body-counting and death-coding often ignore(d) this bigger and far-less-sexy problem, the depressing grimness of deaths-of-despair or homicides and so on leading back to the victory by the Panic people in spring 2020 and their refusal to admit their mega-error. The full accounting requires a finesse that the politicized question will not allow.
All, I know is, the error in the baseline "normal death rate" - about 20% of the excess deaths, various changes to society over the last 2 years, meaning more murders and fatal car accidents - another 5%, deaths of despair - another 5% perhaps and some tens of thousands of vaccine deaths - another couple of percent, well that adds up. Then, the biggest factor, the early deaths due to lack of medical care, could have been much of the rest.

Suffice it to say that Excess Death numbers don't necessarily mean what people seem to think it's obvious they mean - deaths FROM the Kung Flu.

Whewww! That was a long one. Time to get outside. Vitamin D, Bitchez!


* I can do it, of course, but I don't want to get involved in anything resembling spoofing - I will keep deleting the obvious duplicates that I see under the same post, of course.

** This comment is under his own article on The Unz Review touting his usual "The-Americans-Done-It!!" theory, which is, in the scheme of things, just not very important compared to how the virus was USED.

*** Actually, I used to be a numbers guy, but not in this way. I enjoyed doing this stuff however.

**** I think a good summary of one of the two factors, the increased number of murders, is in his 2nd-to-most-recent Taki Magazine article, It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time.

***** I could say the same about a lot of the world, even China. However, this blog is mostly about American stupidity, because we live here!

****** It didn't help early on that, due to PC/wokeness, crowds were encouraged to gather together to fight the xenophobic policies of not letting contagious sick people into the country. It was pretty hilarious - see Be Strong, Wuhan! - but then, I don't have to live there ...

******* It depresses me how the body can let us down in so many ways (yet it usually doesn't!) It wasn't the blood, guts, and cadavers that would have stopped me from going to Med School. In fact, my friend showed me his young lady cadaver (she was killed by lightning), and he was pretty enthralled with her ...

Comments:
The Alarmist
Sunday - June 5th 2022 2:08PM MST
PS

It couldn’t be the “safe & effective” vaxxes ... but it’s the vaxxes.

Dieter Kief
Sunday - June 5th 2022 12:35PM MST
PS
Mod. and Mr. Hail and Adam about Mr. Sailer's mistakes. - I think he was out of his mind with Covid. I remember when in 2021, he in one of the last long Covid threads, seriously asked commenters, how the PCR-test should be looked upon: would it show too many or not enough cases? I mean - this question was clearly under the top, f ya all don't mind me talking a bit loosely here..

I say this: When people are out of their minds, they are literally that.
This idea might be harsh to be synchronized with the idea we share on a daily basis about being one definite self - or a person. I'm saying that in this hindsight we are just .n.o.t. one person or one definite self. - This existential truth is the driving force behind many a classical drama (or comedy, for that matter). All the truly great ones of those psychologically insightful artworks over the centuries are driven by this very: Observation (or: insight): That our selves are not necessarily coherent matters. Seen from that - anthropological - angle, it was a really wise and incredibly insightful decision by Dr. Freud, to refer to Sophokles to name the Oedipus complex (under us critical commenters and blog hosts and so on: Freud's choice here is much more important than the use he made of the Oedipus-reference in his theory. Following Dr. Habermas here, I call Dr. Freud someone, who fooled himself about the very nature of his theory: Other than what he thought, they were not - this is still Dr. Habermas, in Knowledge and Interest, 1968 - - well - here I want to make my quick ending: Dr. Freud's ideas are not about biology to put it bluntly, but about our grammatical or epistemological (or - and this would in my eyes be the best description: Hermeneutical) errors we at times run into when trying to make sense of our lives (ideas/decisions/opinions).

So - go have a look at Molière's Imaginary Invalid, and you will detect Mr. Sailer (and myriads of other people...) stuck with the fact, that illnesses (and - not least: Our ideas about them: How much they affect us, what causes them, how to get along with them - or get rid of them, how to make use of them to better our position in life altogether (very important aspect in clinical settings)) all this, I wanted to say, can definitely change the way we understand the world... - And not necessarily for the better. But - on lots of occasions: For the funnier, as Molière never got tired to - lay bare to us. (I think that Joe Rogan is a guy who digs this existential-comedy-shit too, - his words, almost here, hehe, even though he might never have heard about Molière - (let alone Dr. Habermas, uh, uhh).

Btw. - I have written that at least a dozen times in the last two years, but maybe I am too early with that one: The Imaginary Invalid is the comical classical play of our Covid times (right after Faust, methinks). What I'm still waiting for is the theatre, that would want to make use of my hint and put this damn thing on the stage of our Covid-days.

Seen from a slightly different angle: I do think that Mr. Steve is one of the most productive and insightful public intellectuals. And I don't care for his mistakes, when I make this judgment, because the mistakes don't count when it gets to bright guys ('n' gals alike) with special ideas, able to make those known to the public with a wealth of knowledge and quite some taste (not quite the) Rolling Stones, Sympathy For The Devil)!
Moderator
Sunday - June 5th 2022 8:28AM MST
PS: Mr. Smith and Mr. Kief, thank you both for the additional drug overdose numbers and the comparison to the other death causes, especially of younger people.

Mr. Smith, to me an apology is different from just a quick "I was wrong" or better yet "mistakes were made!", haha. I don't think iSteve would say the latter, but he could just note that he had gotten sucked into the PanicFest narrative a little too far for a few months there (2 or 3 was all it was). He could skip the "I'm sorry" part, as, hey, he's right about a whole lot of other stuff. Some readers don't like hearing about how movie stars did this or that or sports guys dying in shootings and helicopter crashes either, or cough, cough, golf course architecture, cough, but so what? We can put up with that. I think a simple "I went overboard on that 2 years ago" post would make lots of people see him as a more honest and humble guy.
Moderator
Sunday - June 5th 2022 8:21AM MST
PS: Mr. Kief, the question is how much above previous years numbers the deaths of various types in '20 and '21 were. On those overdoses, I imagine it was going up in general, per my reading, but the LOCKDOWN BS had to have increased the despair level for a lot of people.

When you're talking 500,000 or 600,000 excess deaths, well, and extra 25,000 above ''15-'19 for this and an extra 10,000 vaccine deaths (just pulling numbers out of my ass, mind you, as I don't trust that VAERS has NEARLY all the data*) and then an extra 5,000 murders here, and this and that, you get up to 10%, but maybe even 25% pretty quickly. Then, there was the initial queston on the baseline, as the number the CDC had for '19 was above 2.9 million, not the 2.85 million - dang, that's another thing I should have mentioned - shouldn't have grabbed Mr. Unz's cut-and-paste numbers so fast.

Then, there's the biggest question: How many people died in these last 2 years due to a lack of healthcare? That could be a whole lot of the rest.

All in all, I gotta go anecdotal on you all for a second, and I'll tell you that I have never met yet anyone who KNEW anyone who died from the Covid-19. That's ... pretty odd ... when you're talking 1/2 a million more deaths out of 3 million.


* I meant to write something about that in the post, but it was too long already!
Adam Smith
Sunday - June 5th 2022 8:14AM MST
PS: Good morning, Dieter,

It's almost like someone is waging a Fentanyl war on Americans...

According to NPR...

“Data released by the federal government estimates that nearly 108,000 people died from drug overdoses from January to December, 2021.” (“Nearly 94,000 died in 2020.”)

“Over 80,000 of those deaths involved opioids, and more than 71,000 of all opioid related deaths involved illegally manufactured Fentanyl, which in recent years has been mixed in with a range of illicit drugs.”

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/05/11/1098314220/overdose-deaths-continued-to-rise-in-2021-reaching-historic-highs

Meanwhile, 42,915 Americans died in car crashes in 2021.

Adam Smith
Sunday - June 5th 2022 8:02AM MST
PS: Good morning, everyone,

Mr. Hail, I agree that without the CoronaPanic and the so called lockdowns that we likely wouldn't have enjoyed the George Floyd inspired RiotFest and the helicopter money that caused all this inflation. (As I type this my wife is watching last night's news and the reporters are just dumbfounded that the gas prices keep climbing. They'll never connect the reckless money printing to the current inflation. I won't be surprised if they blame Putin.)

Mr. Moderator, it would be nice if Sailer apologized for being a CoronaPanic cheerleader.
(I don't think that will ever happen.)

Sam, Thanks for the link to Ben's story. Medical kidnap is real. It sounds like the hospital was looking for some of that sweet sweet Covid death cash. There's also a lot of money to be made in the organ harvesting and transplant business. Pretty creepy the way the world works these days.

https://forbiddenknowledgetv.net/medical-kidnapping-car-crash-survivor-wakes-up-on-hospital-covid-death-protocol/

Dieter Kief
Sunday - June 5th 2022 7:58AM MST
PS

In the year ending in April 2021, fentanyl claimed the lives of 40,010 Americans ages 18-45. That’s more than car accidents (22,442), suicide (21,678), COVID (21,335), and cancer (17,114).


https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/national/fentanyl-is-the-leading-cause-of-death-in-americans-ages-18-45


Here's how things are going in Oregon after decriminalizing all drugs last year

google

Oregon overdose rates soared after decriminalizing ALL drugs last year | Daily Mail Online
Sam J.
Sunday - June 5th 2022 4:07AM MST
PS

I will say there's a possibility that it's fake but, the sad thing is it could as readily be true. If it is they will surely bury the story.
Moderator
Saturday - June 4th 2022 9:37PM MST
PS: Thanks for this story and the video, Sam. I will look at it in the morning.
Moderator
Saturday - June 4th 2022 9:36PM MST
PS: Yeah, a lot of the problems are connected, Mr. Hail. I agree that the big increase in inflation (from my estimates, up from the last couple of decades of it being 4-5%. - never mind the BLS numbers) was due to that huge amount of extra Covid "relief" spending - $4,000,000,000,000! It was monetary "relief" from the Totalitarian policies to make it all better.

I don't know for sure if the George Floyd worship and sacrifice of businesses and cities would have happened even without the lockdowns. It wouldn't have been as bad I guess, from the BLM side, I'd say. The antifa Commies have been up for this stuff for a long time.

Steve Sailer may occasionally mention the lockdowns as being bad, but I don't know if he's EVER explicitly said that some of these other problems are due to that unheard-of treatment of the American population. That'd be admitting he was wrong to support it 2 years back, a step too far, if you ask me.
Sam J.
Saturday - June 4th 2022 9:24PM MST
PS

They are murdering people for money. Guy has a car accident. A paramedic drugs him against his will. He wakes up in hospital being treated for covid, on a ventilator. Wakes up, he was sedated, they say they were treating him for Covid. Leaves from some building that does not even look like a hospital.

"...Ben Gordon, has a car accident in Flagstaff, AZ where he's banged up but fine. Paramedics show up and immediately, against his wishes, inject him with a sedative. When he wakes up, he's alone and naked in a hospital bed on a ventilator..."

https://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message5034148/pg1?c1=1&c2=1&disclaimer=Continue

Video of him explaining,

https://seed125.bitchute.com/tJ6JtQ5EazOl/6U2GtycmNH5h.mp4



These people should be arrested for attempted murder.
Hail
Saturday - June 4th 2022 7:46PM MST
PS

We can prove with certainty that there are "excess" deaths in certain well-tracked categories. Absent other good general explanations, we have to say there must be lots of Panic- and social-disruption-induced deaths.

Steve Sailer has made lots of hay out of a George Floyd Effect, the larger-scale version of the old Ferguson Effect he wrote about for years. Many more people are killed because of political developments and cynical opportunism by political figures and the media. But it seems harder to explain-away the surge in drug-overdose deaths to a George Floyd Effect (or HAS he tried to do so?).

Nor would a Ferguson/Floyd Effect cause the large rises in depression and suicidal thoughts that were reported in the wake of the "Covid"-Panic, which likes translates into lots of hard-to-calculate Deaths of Despair.

Also remember that there would have been no BLM revival (out of nowhere), no George Floyd Effect as we saw it, without the Corona-Panic that immediately preceded it and used brutal and harsh lockdowns.

The grittier reality is not as sexy as the riots of two years ago or the homicide spikes in all the large cities, but a general "ebbing tide lowers all boats" effect of social and economic dislocation and the myriad of second-order effects. Inflation, similar story. No Corona-Panic, less reckless money printing, less inflation at this scale.
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