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Two new peer-reviewed studies are showing a sharp drop in mortality among hospitalized COVID-19 patients. The drop is seen in all groups, including older patients and those with underlying conditions, suggesting that physicians are getting better at helping patients survive their illness. "We find that the death rate has gone down substantially," says Leora Horwitz, a doctor who studies population health at New York University's Grossman School of Medicine and an author on one of the studies, which looked at thousands of patients from March to August. The study, which was of a single health system, finds that mortality has...

One of the truisms in life is that you can't compare apples to oranges.  The same is true for comparing certain types of data across different countries.  That's why it's important, when debating America's response to the Wuhan virus, to know that another piece of evidence has emerged indicating that the U.S. is grossly overcounting the number of people who died from the Wuhan virus.  It turns out that, while the U.S. attributed all pneumonia fatalities to the virus, Singapore, which had the lowest fatality count in the world, did not. The Deccan Herald explains at some length why Singapore performed so wonderfully...

On Friday, World Health Organization (WHO) official Dr. Mike Ryan said the group’s “best guess” estimate is that 10 percent of the world’s population, or 750 million people, have been infected by the COVID-19 virus. Dr. Ryan sees this as a cause for alarm. “The problem is there is more than six billion left. Therein lies our problem.”While we can all agree that the deaths caused by the Chinese virus are terrible, some simple math can put this number into perspective—something the media seems to be missing.Worldwide, the WHO estimates 1,040,000 (rounded) have died from COVID.So, let’s do the math:1.04...

I haven’t written much about the Wuhan virus lately, because once it became clear that COVID posed a modest threat at most, and my own life returned to normal, I lost interest. At this point, it seems that COVID is more a political than a medical or scientific phenomenon.Several months ago, I wrote a series of posts about COVID in the five Upper Midwestern states. The comparisons seemed useful because the states are similar in many respects, but their responses to the Wuhan epidemic were very different. Now that more water has gone over the dam, it is a...

Refuse Facism, a group who describe the Trump/Pence regime as a "catastrophic danger to humanity and the planet" have organized nationwide rallies for Monday, 21 September in response to the U.S having the highest coronavirus death count in the world. As of Monday morning, Johns Hopkins University places the death toll in the U.S. at 199,512. The group accuses Trump of having "deliberately deceived the world about the danger of the virus" after he was recorded on tape by Watergate journalist Bob Woodward saying how he "wanted to always play it down" when asked about what he knew about the...

A curious but fortunate characteristic of virus epidemics is their limited lifespans. No one knows why, but guesses include herd immunity and mutations of the virus. The following graph from the Centers for Disease Control and the National Center for Health Statistics shows the time profile of the COVID-19 weekly death counts from February onward. (For an interactive version of the graph go here.) In the U.S., the virus got underway in March. For the week ending March 14 the total number of deaths nationwide was 52. During the following month the number of deaths increased rapidly, peaking in the...

For months, Sweden was the punching bag of the world’s media and politicians.For foregoing a lockdown, Sweden was declared a “cautionary tale” by The New York Times. “Sweden is paying heavily for its decision not to lockdown,” President Trump tweeted.“They are leading us to catastrophe,” said The Guardian in March, quoting a virus immunology researcher.Experts and media around the world all seemed to agree, with a few notable exceptions, that lockdowns were the sound approach to the COVID-19 pandemic.There’s been much less talk about Sweden of late. The reason, it would seem, is that Sweden’s strategy appears to have...

We all agree that the data is a mess but based on what the CDC is reporting, COVID-19 peaked in April this year and has been going down ever since. The CDC reported data as of the middle of August related to COVID-19 and pneumonia deaths year to date. The most recent data shows as follows: What we clearly see from the current data is that both COVID and pneumonia peaked in April. The increase of reported deaths in July was minor and certainly not a material event. Also, what is apparent from the data is that there are...

There are lots of numbers flying around about the coronavirus, so here is a brief attempt to put some context to them. The United States daily new case volume rose to the mid 30,000 range in April, then started a slide to about half that level in mid-May. Since then, there has been a steep rise, to the mid 70,0000 level last week, down a bit this weekend to the low 60,000 level. The distribution of cases among the states has also changed. In the first surge, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Louisiana were hardest...

WASHINGTON, July 19 (Xinhua) -- The United States has reported 140,000-plus COVID-19 deaths and more than 3.71 million cases as of Sunday morning, both figures ranking first worldwide, as the global tally of cases has topped 14.3 million with a death toll above 602,000. Despite skyrocketing caseloads, U.S. President Donald Trump said Friday he won't issue an order at the national level mandating the use of masks, even as the country continued to break its single-day coronavirus case record amid a pandemic that is far from being contained. By contrast, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Tuesday...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported the 12th straight week of a declining coronavirus death rate in the U.S. "Based on death certificate data, the percentage of deaths attributed to pneumonia, influenza or COVID-19 (PIC) decreased from 8.1% during week 27 to 6.4% during week 28, representing the twelfth week of a declining percentage of deaths due to PIC," the CDC website states. SEE HERE: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidview/index.html The CDC says the numbers "will likely change as more death certificates are processed, particularly for recent weeks," but a 12-week decline is a well-established trend that just so happens to...

Twitter user Kyle Lamb put together a chart showing the number of deaths reported by the Coronavirus Tracking Project linked to the China coronavirus. The results of his work show that the CTP is adding deaths each week from prior periods that make the current period death totals appear greater than they really are and some of these additions are very suspect. The number of deaths reported publicly come from the Covid Tracking Project. Kyle Lamb created a chart using data from the CDC that shows the number of COVID-19 deaths reported by the CDC and the weeks the death...

The most dangerous flaw in the modern news media is their now constant vulnerability of becoming deeply invested in a particular narrative at the very start of a large story, and then having the ensuing tunnel vision prevent them from adjusting their reporting as new facts become available. I am referring here to the news media’s obsession with using “new cases” as by far the most common, and often only, data point for evaluating how the nation is coping with the coronavirus crisis. For more than two weeks, ever since June 19, when new cases in the United States went...

Donald Trump has celebrated independence day with a string of false and misleading claims attempting to play down the coronavirus pandemic and warning that China will be “held accountable”. The US president staged a “Salute to America” jamboree on the south lawn of the White House with flyovers by military jets, parachute jumps and patriotic songs, but little effort among guests to physical distance or wear face masks. The country has undergone staggering changes unthinkable when Trump hosted the first such event a year ago on 4 July with tanks and other military hardware at the Lincoln Memorial. The coronavirus...

The anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine lowers the death rate of COVID-19 patients, U.S. researchers have said. Researchers conducted a retrospective analysis of over 2,500 patients hospitalized between March 10 and May 2 in the Henry Ford Health System in Michigan. Over 2,000 of the patients were given hydroxychloroquine or the anti-malarial with azithromycin, an antibiotic. The study found 13 percent of those who received hydroxychloroquine alone died compared to 26.4 percent who didn’t receive the drug. Hydroxychloroquine alone decreased the mortality hazard ratio by 66 percent and the anti-malarial with the antibiotic decreased the ratio by 71 percent, researchers said. The...

We first reported on March 17, 2020, on the controversial Ethiopian politician and Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, and his irresponsible and criminal fear mongering. Tedros claimed in a press conference in early March that the fatality rate for the coronavirus was 3.4% — many multiples that of the fatality rate of the common flu which is estimated to be around 0.1%. This egregiously false premise led to the greatest global panic in world history. The Director General of the WHO spoke on March 3, 2020 and shared this related to the coronavirus:...

VIDEO Have you noticed something missing in almost all reports about Covid-19 (coronavirus) cases lately? It is the death rate. And why would that be? Perhaps because in the midst of all the reporting about the number of cases rising (or people reported testing positive) the actual number of daily deaths has been PLUNGING. As you can see in the Worldometers graphs, the daily deaths have dropped dramatically from April 21 to May 21 to June 21 with a drop of over 50% in just the past month. Yes, the same media that emphasized the daily deaths during April...

Mounting evidence suggests the coronavirus is more common and less deadly than it first appeared. The evidence comes from tests that detect antibodies to the coronavirus in a person's blood rather than the virus itself. The tests are finding large numbers of people in the U.S. who were infected but never became seriously ill. And when these mild infections are included in coronavirus statistics, the virus appears less dangerous. "The current best estimates for the infection fatality risk are between 0.5% and 1%," says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. That's in contrast with...

Former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson has developed a wide following on Twitter for detailed posts that challenge some mainstream reporting and government declarations about COVID-19. THEY CENSORED IT! It is based entirely on published government data and scientific papers. It doesn’t say coronavirus isn’t real or doesn’t kill people (in fact, the worst-case death toll is likely to be striking to people). And Amazon won’t run it. — Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) June 4, 2020 Read the full thread here. Thursday morning he tweeted that Amazon had refused to offer for sale his self-published book, “Unreported Truths about COVID-19...

Last week I was searching the Internet for some COVID-19 statistic or other, and I came across a new CDC website. The site featured some numbers the federal government is using to model the spread of the epidemic. One in particular caught my eye: 0.4 percent, the “current best estimate” of the disease’s “case fatality rate.” The document also said that 35 percent of infections are asymptomatic, which suggests the infection fatality rate is just 0.26 percent. These numbers struck me as low for several reasons. For one thing, the virus has already killed 0.2 percent of all New Yorkers,...