Why did so many people die in March/April 2020 from covid when it had already been circulating in the US all winter long with minimal mortality?
Why did so many people die in March/April 2020 from covid when it had already been circulating in the US all winter long with minimal mortality?
Go back to the fall of 2019. How many people do you know (or maybe you yourself) experienced a severe “cold”, achy and fever, horrible cough, saw urgent care numerous times and went through multiple rounds of antibiotics, inhalers, nebulizers, decongestants……..always tested negative for flu or strep, and fought this crud for weeks to a month? Anecdotally, my old facebook page was full of these stories. So many people sick September 2019 - February 2020. In my office, we had a decent round of this junk run through as well. We are a small practice, 15 or less total people working there, and at least half of us had the crud. Our office manager was the sickest I have ever seen him, coughed and coughed for a few weeks, and felt pretty lousy. I had a round of it in November 2019 over Thanksgiving. The front desk staff passed it around to each other. We had 3-4 people sick at the same time with it. But none of us were hospitalized, on a ventilator, or died.
Let’s be real here for a minute. We do have evidence that covid had been circulating in the US since at least September 2019. We went back and tested blood, sputum specimens, and other human biological products in a retrospective study and we did find SARS antibodies in some of those samples. It was a myth that it landed here in Seattle on January 20, 2020. We had news reports of a woman dying of covid in San Francisco in December 2019. ICU physicians saw covid in France and England back in December 2019. It didn’t suddenly escape Wuhan in early January. Remember the Wuhan games in October 2019 where multiple people got sick and brought that illness back home with them across the world? But here is where it gets interesting. Prior to March 2020, excess mortality was normal. It was not elevated. So why, did the virus that had been spreading for at least 6 months, suddenly turn deadly in March 2020?
The above is a screenshot of excess mortality from the United States and Wales. You can see that the entire “peak” of flu season was normal. What led to the sudden spikes after week 10 2020 in both countries? Many argue it is due to how we suddenly shifted our treatment of flu like symptoms AFTER the covid pandemic was announced on mainstream media. Some hypothesize that we had a different variant earlier in the winter and a more deadly variant emerged in the spring of 2020. Some argue that “flu” suppressed that original variant and then suddenly the new covid variant was able to “over-run” the “flu” and make people much more sick. However, if that was the case, then why was excess mortality only experienced in places where excess ventilator use was going on, but mortality was lower in states where ventilator use was more conservative?
Then there is this perspective by Dr. Malone.
“To date, we still don’t have especially good studies on the actual causes of excess deaths by state and country when the world first went into lockdown in spring 2020.
For political reasons, these deaths were all generally been lumped together as “Covid deaths,” but this coding was appallingly sloppy. According to the World Health Organization’s initial coding guidance, if a decedent had either tested positive—using a PCR test later confirmed by the New York Times to have a false positive rate over 85%—or been in contact with anyone who had within several weeks prior to their death, then the death should be classified as a “Covid death.” This enormous number of “Covid deaths” was obviously belied by the fact that many places reporting those “Covid deaths,” such as Maine, actually had no excess deaths to speak of.
Thus, this article reexamines data from the US CDC on all-cause excess deaths by state during peak lockdown in April 2020 using the information we now know to determine what actually caused them.
This examination concludes that, contrary to popular belief, there was no uniquely deadly strain or variant emanating out of New York in spring 2020; this is clear from the fact that several states close to New York such as Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine experienced little to no excess deaths during that time period.
On the contrary, over 30,000 Americans appear to have been killed by mechanical ventilators or other forms of medical iatrogenesis throughout April 2020, primarily in the area around New York.
This result is not altogether surprising, as subsequent studies revealed a 97.2% mortality rate among those over age 65 who were put on mechanical ventilators in accordance with the initial guidance from the WHO—as opposed to a 26.6% mortality rate among those over age 65 who weren’t put on mechanical ventilators—before a grassroots campaign put a stop to the practice by the beginning of May 2020.
As one doctor later told the Wall Street Journal, “We were intubating sick patients very early. Not for the patients’ benefit, but in order to control the epidemic… That felt awful.” To put this in perspective, patients over age 65 were more than 26 times as likely to survive if they were not placed on mechanical ventilators.”
It may be tempting, therefore, to conclude that a particularly deadly strain or variant emerged around March 2020 in New York and began emanating from there, which was generally the mainstream narrative at the time.
However, the idea that a particularly deadly strain or variant began emanating from New York in March 2020 is belied by the fact that states like Vermont and New Hampshire, which are both very close to New York, had some of the lowest percentages of excess deaths of any states. Even more remarkably, Maine is very close to New York and had virtually no excess deaths to speak of throughout April 2020. These counterexamples of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, each of which is very close to New York but experienced few if any excess deaths in spring 2020, strongly refute the notion that a particularly deadly virus began spreading from New York in March 2020. This is also in line with the many studies that have now shown Covid actually began spreading undetected all over the world by fall 2019 at the very latest.
“In conclusion, low-income population density, cold weather, and the overuse of mechanical ventilators were all strong correlates with excess deaths in spring 2020. The popular belief that a particularly deadly strain or variant emanated out of New York in March 2020 is belied by the absence of excess deaths in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. Rather, the outsized number of excess deaths in the area around New York is better explained by the particular hysteria in that region for mechanical ventilators which decreased the survival rate for patients over age 65 by 26-fold. Some 30,000 patients in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Massachusetts appear to have been killed by mechanical ventilators or other medical iatrogenesis in April 2020.”
It's likely that all winter, Covid was generally killing the people who were on the edge of death. Obviously we wouldn't notice this because old and sick people literally die every winter during what we used to call flu season.
Then our REACTION to covid cause vent death AND sped up the curve by infecting all the at-risk at once. Six or seven states basically mandated a covid outbreak in every nursing home. Then THAT caused the media panic that likely scared a bunch of people to death. (Remember how people were asking why people in NYC were dropping dead of heart attacks at home but not going to the hospital?)
Now we're determined to kill people with the jabs, too.
It's almost as if it's a nefarious plot or something.
At my midwest hospital we only intubated when the hypoxia was severe - there were no intubations "just because covid". No one was willing to use high flow O2 or BiPAP due to concern of spreading contagion. The PEEPs needed were higher than I'd ever seen, hence the lung injury, but there wasn't an alternative at the time.