Margaret and Helen

Margaret, lots of people are claiming that 200,000 Americans have not died from COVID. They are right. I did the research. I actually talked to some doctors, did some investigating… I spent hours reading about mortality rates. Honestly, it’s a global pandemic. What better reason will you ever have for dedicating hours to such a boring, mundane endeavor? It would be so much easier to just watch a YouTube video or read a Tweet and draw your conclusion. But why would you do that if it meant putting yourself or your loved ones at risk? To make sure you have the facts, you must dig. So, my dog dug.

Now I know many of our readers are waiting for me to use a few dirty words or make a joke. They expect me to call Trump an asshat. But this really is too important. If you support Trump, my need to make a joke shouldn’t be a reason for you not to read this. Nor should it be a reason for a Biden supporter to not forward this to their Trump supporting family members. Because of that, I am going to do my level best to be serious.

If you don’t believe that almost 200 thousand Americans have died from COVID-19, you are right.

I dare you to keep reading…

There seem to be two different but related theories out there suggesting that the number is closer to 10,000. One theory is that hospitals are making more money by recording as many deaths as possible as COVID deaths.  Another theory suggests that it isn’t about money, but rather its about the way you count COVID deaths even if the patient died of something else. In that theory, a patient who has COVID but dies in a car crash would be counted as a COVID death.  Neither are true. First, hospitals don’t have that power. Second, there are not that many bad people. And last, scientists are not that stupid.

First, you need to understand how medical records work. They begin the moment you are seen by a healthcare worker.  That worker could simply be the person who answers the phone at your doctor’s office. But if you are dying from COVID you have probably bypassed your doctor’s office and headed straight to the hospital. Your medical record begins when you arrive, stays with you for your entire stay – growing the whole time. It lives with you until you leave and even then, it follows you.  And if you die, it continues to live and grow after you have expired. For a hospital to falsely report your death as COVID-19 would require the coordination of clerks, technicians, nurses, doctors, administrators, coroners, health departments, insurance companies, your family members and even the Federal Government. Plus, for it to be impacting numbers on a national level with any significance, it would have to be hundreds of hospitals and tens of thousands of healthcare professionals plus insurance companies AND the Federal Government. That just doesn’t happen. Simply put, that dog don’t hunt. Theory one ain’t happening.

Theory two sounds a little more believable. This is the one where everyone who tests positive for COVID and then dies gets counted as a COVID death even if they died in a car crash. Again, false. Here is why. First, it is not uncommon that multiple causes of death might appear on your records. Yes. You might die in a car crash. But car crash isn’t a medical reason for death. Complications resulting from a car crash are. COVID is not a complication of a car crash. However, let’s say you have cancer and you contract COVID and ultimately die. You indeed could have a cause of death listed as cancer and COVID. It might even just say COVID. Or let’s say you are dying of something else. You are in hospice with a few weeks left to live and you get COVID before you die. Again, your record could show that your cause of death was the illness or illnesses that got you to hospice as well as COVID. It stands to reason that in both of those cases counting them as COVID deaths would be overcounting COVID deaths. Of course, in the case of cancer, you might have lived a few more months, years or even beaten it all together. We have a family friend who was battling breast cancer and might have beaten it. But she contracted COVID and it was just too much for her body to handle – chemo and COVID is pretty nasty. Sadly, we lost her.

But here is the deal…

The CDC takes all of that into account. They don’t just grab all the death certificates and look for COVID and then add them up. Please. Our scientists are smarter than that. And thank god they are. If you are hoping for a vaccine, especially one before the election, you better damn well hope our scientists are smarter than that. The CDC looks at modalities and expected outcomes and statistical variations and… well sciency things. I’m not a scientist and probably neither are you. Simply put, they take into account the deaths they would expect to see during a period of time based on what they have seen in past years and then compare that to actual deaths during that period of time and then adjust for which deaths should be counted as COVID and which should not. So, theory two comes to an end. It’s not true. Stop spreading it. And stop pointing at YouTube videos with unknown narrators telling you that the person who said that really meant this. Trust me. That narrator is an asshat.

But wait. You said the number was false. You said that 200,000 Americans haven’t died from COVID. 

You’re right. I did say that. THE NUMBER IS PROBABLY HIGHER. 

COVID is still new to us.  It’s still new to doctors and scientists. And we are not testing everyone. Sometimes you die from COVID.  Sometimes you die from COVID plus XYZ. Sometimes you were going to die regardless. BUT sometimes you die never knowing you had COVID. It never made it into your Medical Record and, therefore, they never knew that maybe what you died from wouldn’t have killed you had you not had COVID.

But a bunch of us saw a tweet from the President that said only 6% of the reported cases were actually COVID.

The tweet you saw from the President was actually a tweet that he misunderstood and re-tweeted. It was falsely claiming that there were really only 9,000 cases because only 6% had COVID as the only cause of death. What that actually means is that when you get COVID you frequently develop complications that eventually kill you – complications you wouldn’t have gotten if you didn’t have COVID. For example, if you contract COVID and you then develop acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) that kills you, your death record will show ARDS and COVID. People actually read the President’s tweet and went in the absolute wrong direction. This COVID is so nasty that most people who get it will develop at least 2.5 other deadly complications. Which means that most of the time you NOT ONLY die from COVID but also everything else the bastard did to your body once you were infected. 200,000 deaths might not sound like a lot, but COVID-19 is very deadly. And if one of those deaths is your loved one then even one death would seem like one too many.

But honestly. Why are we having this conversation? Why would you choose to believe that our scientists and medical experts are lying to you? What could possibly be in it for them? All of them? We know that hospitals in many cities across the country saw unusually high admissions. Scratch that… extraordinarily high admissions. Trust me. It wasn’t the money. Those hospitals make way more money off elective surgeries and those surgeries had to be cancelled because of COVID. And ICU beds in many of our largest medical centers became scarce. That didn’t go away until a great many of us started taking it seriously and either went into full quarantine mode or at the very least started wearing masks and social distancing. Imagine if we had not done that? And imagine how much better off we would be if the rest of you had done it too. Remember Spring Break? Memorial weekend? Fourth of July? The Trump Rally in Tulsa? The Sturgis motorcycle rally?

If you are a Trump supporter, you now can hear it straight from the President of the United States. He is on the record as saying this is deadly and at least five times (5x) worse than the flu  (click on that link and listen for yourself). You can hear him say that it is airborne, and it is more deadly than “even your strenuous flus”.  (REMEMBER THAT WORD STRENUOUS FOR A SECOND)

Every year the flu kills on average 30,000 Americans. But the flu is seasonal. We are usually only dealing with it 4 to 6 months each year. AND we have vaccines. COVID is not seasonal. It keeps killing month after month. There is currently no vaccine. We have had it for at least 6 months. About as long as not a typical flu season but rather a BAD flu season – A STRENUOUS FLU SEASON. In bad flu years we see close to 50,000 deaths. So, if COVID-19 is 5 times more deadly than the flu, we would expect to see 5×50,000= 250,000…  Well I’ll be. This dog did hunt.

Math. Science. Smart people. Listen to them. Wear a mask so we can finally put this damn thing behind us.  

And when it comes to the election remember this. Trump knew. He never once encouraged you to wear a mask. In fact, he invited you to mass gatherings in multiple states and never once encouraged you to wear a mask. He knew it was dangerous. He has admitted that he knew and that he downplayed it. The other guy did the opposite. Remember that. I mean it. Really.

(Want more? Follow Margret and Helen on Twitter @HelenPhilpot)

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