We don't have a Covid crisis - we have a public information crisis.
That's my conclusion, after reviewing the latest mortality data from Ireland.
Here are my updated and extended charts.πππ
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Firstly, remember that "Covid-19 deaths" includes people who died of other things.
Leo Varadkar:
"We counted all deaths, in all settings, suspected cases even when no lab test was done, and included people with underlying terminal illnesses who died with Covid but not of it."
Secondly, take a look at the unadjusted all-cause mortality data (with thanks to @Thorgwen).
You'll note that April 2020 (based on deaths registered so far) is comparable to flu months in January 2017 and January 2018.
Year-to-date registrations so far, up to June, look normal.
Now I'm going to make two important adjustments, as I've done before.
First, I adjust for expected late registrations. In the interest of transparency, you can see my forecast below.
Second, I adjust for the growing population (it's also ageing, but I don't adjust for this).
We can now say with even more certainty that April 2020 was about as bad as January in a harsh winter.
Competing explanations for the deaths sadly witnessed in April: Covid-19, major disruption to the health service and care homes, and two mild winter seasons preceeding it.
Let's take the mild January this year into account, and look at year-to-date deaths to May.
From this perspective, 2020 mortality is about the same as 2018 and very similar to both 2015 and 2016.
Is the hysterical media coverage of death this year justified by the reality?
And if we include what looks like a very mild June 2020, then we are left with an almost perfectly average year.
Note that 2019 is the outlier year, not 2020. H1 2019 was remarkably mild.
More evidence that there was an unusually large cohort of vulnerable people in early 2020.
Now let's prove that the official Covid-19 death toll is wrong simply by excluding all Covid-19 deaths from the previous charts.
When you do this, you get record low mortality in 2020.
In the context of the severe disruption to the health service, this doesn't make any sense.
CONCLUSIONS:
The official Covid-19 death toll does not make sense.
Mild winters and health service disruption can explain much of the spike in April.
Low mortality in June might reflect the age profile of those who sadly passed in April.
Overall mortality in 2020 is normal.
β’ β’ β’
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It has been requested that I do a simpler version of this thread, explaining why the modellers advising the Irish government are so amazingly wrong in their forecasts and in their understanding of the risk from Covid-19.
1. The death count is wrong. We know this because it has been admitted to be wrong by the government (including by Leo Varadkar) and the number itself makes no sense.
Why is Ireland locking down again? Look no further than our Covid-19 spreadsheet modellers.
They are unshakeable in the belief that Covid-19 remains a deadly threat to the population. But as I'm about to reveal, they are standing on shaky ground.
Meet Professor Philip Nolan, Chair of the Epidemiological Modelling Group on Ireland's NPHET. This man is the key provider of Covid-19 statistical analysis and forecasts to the Irish government.
Think of him as the Irish equivalent of Neil Ferguson.
In the thread above, he claims that about 1/3 of all infections were detected by PCR during the epidemic peak in April.
If that's true, and testing continued to find a high % of cases, then total infections so far might only be c. 100k-150k (vs. the official case count of 50k).
According to TheJournal, it's a "far-right conspiracy theory" that "Covid-19 death rates are being inflated as a way of justifying continued restrictions on the public."
TheJournal says "Covid-19 was a factor in all of those 1,806 deaths".
Time for a factcheck by Leo Varadkar.
Varadkar:
"In Ireland we counted all deaths, in all settings, suspected cases even when no lab test was done, and included people with underlying terminal illnesses who died with Covid but not of it."
The death count includes people who died with Covid, not of it. Got that?
Varadkar:
"This was right approach but skewed the numbers. Priority is to save lives not look good in league tables."
Is that clear enough? They skewed the numbers to "save lives", by frightening people into accepting restrictions.
Today, an RTE article makes a speculative argument that C19 is definitely worse than a bad flu, despite acknowledging fewer death notices from March to May 2020 than "either of the severe flu seasons in DecemberβFebruary in 2017/18 and 2016/17".
If you asked your barber whether you needed a haircut, would you expect an unbiased answer?
And what would you expect, if you asked the vaccine industry whether the world needed more vaccines β would they say no?
Itβs time to spill the beans, with a thread. Strap yourself in.
A few disclaimers.
Firstly, believing things which are in your economic self-interest doesnβt make you a bad person. Itβs completely normal.
Like millions of others, I would benefit financially from the scrapping of Covid-19 rules. I have no hesitation in acknowledging that.
But what about the experts who hype the risks from Covid-19? What if they might benefit from the fear they generate?
We should still trust that they act in good faith, and we should recognise their expertise (we recognise our barberβs expertise in cutting hair, after all).