Is anything real anymore?

Fake News all the way down?

From Comparing COVID-19 Deaths to Flu Deaths Is like Comparing Apples to Oranges by Jeremy Samuel Faust.

We know the Covid-19 infection and death data are a mess and not to be relied upon except as an order of magnitude estimate. The death data certainly does not include all diagnosable Covid-19 deaths and it certainly includes many, perhaps the majority, which are counted as Covid-19 with no diagnostic confirmation. And that is entirely separate from the more refined question of degree of contribution to death when multiple co-morbidities are involved.

From the article.

In late February, when the stock market was beginning to fall over coronavirus fears, President Donald Trump held a briefing at the White House to reassure people that there was little chance of the virus causing significant disruption in the United States.

“I want you to understand something that shocked me when I saw it,” he said. “The flu, in our country, kills from 25,000 people to 69,000 people a year. That was shocking to me.”

His point was to suggest that the coronavirus was no worse than the flu, whose toll of deaths most of us apparently barely noticed.

In early April, as social distancing measures began to succeed in flattening the curve in some parts of the country, an influential forecasting model revised the number of American deaths from coronavirus that it was projecting by summer downward to 60,400, and some people again began making comparisons to the flu, arguing that, if this will ultimately be no worse than a bad flu season, we should open the country up for business again. (On April 22, the model’s forecast rose to 67,641 deaths.)

Whatever our forecasting, people have been inclined to use the flu as a benchmark. Could have been overdoses, could have been pneumonia. People have settled on flu.

Faust has a surprise for us. We know the challenges of measuring Covid-19 deaths. I don't know about you but I had given little thought to the definition and data collection of flu data other than to recognize that there was a tie with pneumonia.

Apparently I am not alone in this oversight.

When reports about the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 began circulating earlier this year and questions were being raised about how the illness it causes, COVID-19, compared to the flu, it occurred to me that, in four years of emergency medicine residency and over three and a half years as an attending physician, I had almost never seen anyone die of the flu. I could only remember one tragic pediatric case.

Based on the CDC numbers though, I should have seen many, many more. In 2018, over 46,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses. Over 36,500 died in traffic accidents. Nearly 40,000 died from gun violence. I see those deaths all the time. Was I alone in noticing this discrepancy?

I decided to call colleagues around the country who work in other emergency departments and in intensive care units to ask a simple question: how many patients could they remember dying from the flu? Most of the physicians I surveyed couldn’t remember a single one over their careers. Some said they recalled a few. All of them seemed to be having the same light bulb moment I had already experienced: For too long, we have blindly accepted a statistic that does not match our clinical experience.

Apparently the light bulb moment is that once again our Mandarin Class have been lying to the public in order to achieve their own objectives. A postmodern, deconstructionist, critical theory world where there is no objective reality.

The 25,000 to 69,000 numbers that Trump cited do not represent counted flu deaths per year; they are estimates that the CDC produces by multiplying the number of flu death counts reported by various coefficients produced through complicated algorithms. These coefficients are based on assumptions of how many cases, hospitalizations, and deaths they believe went unreported. In the last six flu seasons, the CDC’s reported number of actual confirmed flu deaths—that is, counting flu deaths the way we are currently counting deaths from the coronavirus—has ranged from 3,448 to 15,620, which far lower than the numbers commonly repeated by public officials and even public health experts.

We don't know the true number of confirmed (not estimated) Covid-19 deaths. And apparently we also don't know the true number of confirmed (not estimated) Flu deaths. It feels sometimes like the Mandarin Class live in a world of mirrors and shadows, a world that is not real and measured.

Why would the CDC provide flu numbers several factors above the confirmed?

I can only speculate. Is it to drive the urgency for flu shots (a separate topic in terms of estimated effectiveness)? Possibly. Is it a commercial consideration, i.e. pharma companies are working hand-in-glove with the CDC to drive demand for flu treatments? Possibly. Institutional inertia? Possibly.

Regardless, once again the public is being told that the representation of reality presented by the Mandarin Class is false and possibly deliberately false for Mandarin Class benefit.

This continued compulsion to misrepresent, either from error or deliberate intent, is not beneficial to a system which to an extraordinary extent, depends on trust.