New York undercounted C-19 deaths
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NY's Attorney General says that the Cuomo Administration undercounted C-19 deaths by 50%.
NY AG is a Democrat, so you can't claim it's partisan politics.
A couple of Democrat state Senators are calling for an official investigation.
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Undercounting and overcounting (both have happened) - what could possibly be the benefit of incorrect numbers in either direction? It is not going to work out in the long run.
This kind of stuff needs to be factual and void of politics from any direction.
We have not been able to host dinner here for a while for one of our best friends because her convent keeps having Covid-19 issues with their nursing home and residences.
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@raphjd
The issue here, if you dig deeper, isn't as controversial as it appears at first glance. FIRST OF ALL: the report is not that they under-reported ALL COVID deaths by 50%! No, they under-counted the deaths IN NURSING HOMES by up to 50%. BIG DIFFERENCE THERE!If you can remember back, at the early part of the pandemic, NY was taking COVID patients who couldn't be helped (or didn't need ICU attention) in hospitals and sending them to long-term care facilities - many of which were nursing homes. The issue was, they needed the beds in the hospitals, and we didn't know yet that the virus was spread by aerosol (we still thought, at the time, that it was a contact thing).
We can argue later about the tragic consequences on sending COVID patients to nursing homes to die, and the effect that had on COVID in the other nursing home patients...
So, a hospital sends a COVID patient they cannot help to a nursing home - ostensibly to die (remember, back then we didn't have the treatments we have today - that we had just 6-10 weeks later!). And, of course, that person shortly thereafter passes away... from COVID.
Is that a death in the NURSING HOME, or is that a death from the Hospital who sent them there, essentially to die?
Some nursing homes didn't report these as "their deaths" because they weren't their patient before they got COVID! They still had to worry about those numbers being public and the fact that they still wanted to care for patients AFTER the pandemic -- and who wants to go live in a nursing home where thousands of people died from COVID?
An investigation needs to occur, most certainly. But don't expect real-world scenarios to fit neatly into your conveniently labeled boxes.
-- EDIT here -- That last comment came across as somewhat snarky when I re-read my own post. It wasn't meant as such. My point wasn't directed at any one person (@raphjd especially) - rather a point about ALL of us (even me) who would like to have "life" fit into neat, clearly defined categories... and that's just not the real world in which we live.
There is actually very little BLACK AND WHITE in our world - it's truly a RAINBOW of colors.... and while that makes organizing and categorizing (and understanding) things much more difficult, it is also what makes life so wonderful! IMHO -
It's still an undercount.
It's also an undercount of the deaths directly caused by Cuomo himself.
Scotland had the same thing. The First Minister ordered the hospitals cleared and the C-19 infected to be sent to nursing homes. The death figures were low balled until it came out that the numbers were much higher, but the ruling party still refuses to have an investigation into the true figures.
Both the US and UK (and most of the rest of the west) artificially inflated C-19 deaths. In the UK, we saw that people were having their death certs being altered to say C-19 even when they clearly didn't die from it. Then, anyone who ever tested positive for C-19 and then later died, regardless of the actual cause, death was listed as C-19. Now it's only 4 weeks after a positive C-19 test, regardless of the actual cause of death.
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@raphjd
Wait a minute... you're complaining about an UNDER-count in NY because the nursing homes didn't report the hospital's cases as their own....Then you claim there was a massive OVER-count?
I guess you CAN have your cake and eat it too! At least you can!
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If it's such a non-issue, then why is it an issue to the NY AG and a few Democrat state Senators? Why is Cuomo refusing to release the report?
The overcount is a different issue but it does show people are fudging the numbers for their own purposes.
The UK's version of Fauci is 2 doctors and they admitted to fudging the numbers to cause the pre-Christmas lockdown and some others during the summer.
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@raphjd
I think you're missing my point....There are always going to be errors in the accounting of who actually died from COVID-19, and who didn't.
FOR EXAMPLE:
So a guy who is in stage-4 renal failure - has 3-months to live and is awaiting a kidney transplant... and he gets COVID-19 and dies in... 3-months! Did the COVID-19 kill him? Or was it the lack of a kidney for transplant?.... and what if he was HIV+ (not on meds), had type-1 diabetes, and was a heavy smoker too?
The truth is, there is SELDOM a SINGLE cause of death in real hospitals - real life just isn't that fragile.
With regard to COVID, though - it has been a moving target from the beginning! We learn more and more every day, and hindsight is 20/20... so while we know now that the decision to place COVID patients in nursing homes to die had TRAGIC, even horrific, consequences... but they didn't know that then.
That DOESN'T MEAN it shouldn't be investigated - improving our knowledge of how we got here isn't a bad thing.
But complaining that the weatherman got the wind speed wrong in the middle of a hurricane is kind-of pointless. What was important (at the time) was that there was a storm in the first place!
Learning the ACTUAL statistics will be important in the aftermath, but it is of no real value to blame the weatherman for getting the specifics wrong while in the middle of the storm (unless, the TRUTH WAS that there was no storm at all to begin with)... but I'm hoping that's not your claim: that COVID isn't "real"... -
@bi4smooth I appreciate your well laid out points in the different topics!
Absolutely great to see in the forums.
Cheers!
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@erich214
Thanks! It's nice to be appreciated.
I've always liked "debate" - I don't think I'm always right, but I actually do think I'm "smarter than the average bear" (or, for a younger audience: "smarter than a 5th grader" ) - and I usually think things through...
The point being, I love debate, but I don't always win
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None of that is a response to why Cuomo refuses to release the report. Nor does it respond to why intentionally deceptive counting.
If I test positive for C-19 today and 3weeks and 6 days later I get killed by being run over by a cross town bus, it's listed as a C-19 death. The previous UK counting method was if I ever die from anything after a positive C-19 test it would count as a C-19 death.
We also had the UK's version of Fauci admitting to fudging the numbers to force lockdowns.
C-19 has been going on long enough that we can investigate the problems that have already occurred.
Only an idiot would think that throwing a bunch of sick people into nursing homes was a good idea.
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Except for some young people needing a longer recuperation, going into a nursing home usually has only three ways out: hospice, hospital, or funeral home.
Throw Covid-19 into that mess, and it makes it bad for everyone, especially for the vulnerable ones that were already there.
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@raphjd
Lots to unpack there: thoughts meander much?In the early part of the pandemic, counting anyone who tested positive for the virus and subsequently died a victim of the disease was probably just a way to get around the fact that we knew SO LITTLE about it, and had little way of otherwise "filtering" results to get better data. Over time, all of that reporting will undoubtedly be revised for accuracy.
Forget the political leadership for a moment - the people who do the counting - who generate the reports - are usually career public health experts. In most cases, their only agenda is saving lives. (Fuckin weasly bastards!)
Now, what politicians do with that data is another thing... and in that, there is always politics. While I don't agree with any kind of playing with the numbers, I must say: I strongly prefer a politician fudging the numbers in an effort to save lives, over one fudging the numbers and sacrificing lives in the name of political expediency. Again: neither is good, but saving lives is still better than ignoring them.
I've already said - multiply now - that going back and re-examining our entire response - GLOBALLY - to the COVID-19 pandemic is definitely a wise thing to do... although, right now, I would personally rather that they keep focusing on getting through the pandemic... we can investigate early missteps once the threat has been reduced! Still, the only way we learn from our mistakes, is to discover them to begin with!
Finally: in the early days of COVID-19, we thought it was spread by contact - thus the suggestions you do things like wiping down your groceries before taking them into your house. Putting a sick patient you cannot help into a nursing home seemed, at the time, a humane way to let them die in peace, and in the presence of their families - while also freeing up badly needed space in the hospitals. The other patients in the nursing homes weren't exactly "visiting" the COVID-19 patients, and since there would be no cross-contact, it was thought to be a safe, humane way to treat the un-treatable.
It is important to put these things into the proper context: we had few treatments at the time that were effective once your disease got to a certain point... to put a fine point on it, yes: they were sent to the nursing homes to die!
And, as I've pointed out multiply already, we didn't know it was spread by aerosol. Thus, we didn't know we were exposing other nursing home patients to the disease... we thought the infection-control in the nursing homes would be adequate. (They were not)
It is also important to note that this practice wasn't wide-spread: it happened only in the hottest of the hot-spots... the biggest cities with the worst outbreaks. Hospital beds were desperately needed to treat the victims who were treatable and had some reasonable hope of survival.
It is not fair to judge their decisions or actions then based on what we know now! First, with the advanced therapeutics, immune-therapies, and other knowledge of how to treat COVID-19 (like putting patients on their stomachs!), there aren't many (any?) "un-treatable" patients any longer... while there is still a shortage of hospital beds, these patients have a decent chance to survive COVID-19 right up until the end, so there is no ethical rationale to send them elsewhere to die. Secondly, knowing now (what we didn't know then) - that COVID-19 is an aerosol disease - we would never put a dying patient anywhere that there wasn't a full quarantine in place.
While we (as a population) need to learn, and take heed, from the mistakes made in the early days of COVID-19 (and the US and UK are far from the only countries who struggled with their responses), care should be taken not to recriminate against people who were doing the best they could with little to no knowledge of what they were facing.
Simply put: we need to learn, but we do not need to blame.
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I wonder how you'd respond if Cuomo was a Republican. Would you still be saying that we shouldn't blame?
True, we did believe China and the WHO, who blatantly lied to us about C-19.
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@raphjd
You assume I'm a Democrat.
You are again a finalist in the "Miss Taken" pageant! We'll try to get you another sash, but we're running low.I'm a conservative, I'm just not a conspiracy-confused one.
I believe in science: facts don't lie, but people who interpret them often do.
I believe in Democracy (even when i lose).
I believe in the general goodness of the average person.
I believe that Joe Biden won the recent election fair and square.I do not believe that nationalism works in anyone's best interests.
I do not believe in racism - especially as a political tool.
I do not believe in absolutes.
I do not believe in secret cabals of child molesting politicians, threatening our children - primarily because they belong to the other party.I personally know very fine politicians of both political parties here in the US. Honorable men and women who do not agree (not with me, and certainly not with each other), and yet, remain friends.
To my misguided (sometimes mis-labeled) Conservative friends who believe whole-heartedly that Donald Trump is their savior, I say this: Repent of your sins now, before your God judges you!
I also offer this: count the letters - compromise is not a 4-letter word!
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AH, you are so morally superior. We should make a monument so we can worship you.
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@raphjd
I don't believe @bi4smooth's latest post contained any intent of indicating moral superiority?Merely stating what he believes and does not believe in and defining them clearly/explicitly.
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@erich214
Thank you for your comments.
At least so far in this forum, @raphjd appears to adhere to the "you're with me or you're against me" mentality. (I labeled this "bipolar", but he took to interpreting that solely as the mental disorder - even when I clarified it for him, so I'll try an different tack...).Well to be clear: I am not with him, but neither am I against him.
I have said that we do need to look back, investigate, and learn what we did wrong in the early days of COVID spreading in our respective countries.
@raphjd seems to have already made up his mind based on conspiracy theories and partial (to be generous) data. I prefer to wait for some real data.
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Ah, so you are playing the moral superiority crap by claiming I'm a CTer.
Great, now we know where we both stand.
Then again, you did say you were smarter than everyone else.
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@erich214 said in New York undercounted C-19 deaths:
@raphjd
I don't believe @bi4smooth's latest post contained any intent of indicating moral superiority?Merely stating what he believes and does not believe in and defining them clearly/explicitly.
After his last post, do you still believe that he wasn't trying to claim he is morally superior?
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@raphjd
I have limited my opinions of you, and what you believe to what you've posted in the forum... it's all I have to go on, and I won't extrapolate further.I never said I was smarter than everyone else, just smarter than "the average bear" (or a 5th Grader)... that's a pretty low bar, if you ask me!
Would that you would limit your opinions of me to what I've actually posted, and not extrapolate further... but "wishes ain't fishes"...
