7 Likes
Evidently a 40 year old connection to some cells means more to them than actual people living now. You’d think they’d keep their mouths shut after the pedophile scandals. Makes me glad I’m a pagan.
13 Likes
Child molester says what?
9 Likes
Yeah, either the TPM writeup here is bad, or the study is bullshit. The proportion of those aged over 65 in 2020 was a bit higher than 2019, but it was a tiny increase. The trend in death rates 2015-2020 would be expected to be slightly upward because of the aging population. Any number above that trendline for 2020 would be excess deaths, and probably almost all from COVID. The cumulative total under the 2020 actual trend would be then expected to be about 500,000 (the reported COVID deaths) higher. But we know Florida is lying about its COVID deaths, Texas is probably lying, also several other states too, and rural areas everywhere are underreporting.
What the TPM writeup says the study says is that the trendline in 2020 was only very slightly above the expected + 500,000. If that’s really what the study says, that’s bullshit. The number of COVID deaths may not be 2/3 higher than 500,000, but I bet it’s closer to 700,000 than 500,000.
8 Likes
We probably did. But those deaths might be offset by who knows how many fewer automobile deaths because people weren’t commuting to work, and the reduced numbers of heart attacks and such. Plus the flu season basically disappeared for a year. Lots of variables.
11 Likes
This atheist agrees with you.
“Religion poisons everything.” - Christopher Hitchens
And we know what poison does.
2 Likes
It’s one archdiocese (NOLA) and I agree, they should keep their fucking mouths shut.
I am Catholic, GET what they are talking about, but I DO NOT GET what donated tissues haves to do with the price of coffee in June.
For all ‘they’ know, it was a miscarried fetus that donated the cells. And they don’t seem to care.
8 Likes
The impact of the virus on the elderly is obvious, but I’d like to see rates of death among the elderly at different stages over the past year and to what degree they can, account for hospitals not being overwhelmed and medical professionals learning how best to treat covid-patients. Not all certainly, but so much of the deaths early on could have been avoided through clear guidance from the top to avoid overwhelming healthcare workers and facilities and to allow the learning curve they required time to happen.
2 Likes
Great. Wait for the other vaccine. That just means more of the convenient J and J is available for the rest of us.
1 Like
No doubt, but the modeling and record-keeping are pretty sophisticated.
Also, many of the early deaths were written off as pneumonia or some other bug because they hadn’t been tested. Lots of excess pneumonia deaths in Florida and Texas for example.
ETA Washington, too. Deaths in nursing homes were ascribed to pneumonia or dementia due to lack of testing. Really messed with the early efforts to get a handle on the spread of COVID.
10 Likes
…measured in megadeaths.
2 Likes
Here’s their conclusion.
The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in an estimated 218 000 excess deaths in the United States between March and August 2020, and 80% of those deaths had COVID-19 as the underlying cause. Accounting for population changes substantially reduced the excess non–COVID-19 death estimates, providing important information for guiding future clinical and public health interventions.
Later, the author claims:
Although this is a substantial number of excess deaths in a 6-month period, it is 83 000 fewer than would have been estimated if we had failed to account for population growth and aging.
And,
Our analysis has several other limitations. First, our estimates of excess deaths are probably too low because of known delays in reporting death certificate data to the CDC, and more underreporting probably occurred in the most recent months. Provisional data released by the CDC on 12 November 2020 for deaths through 31 August 2020 were used to reduce the impact of reporting delays. Nevertheless, even this 10-week delay will miss deaths, because a recent CDC methodologic report indicated that 5.4% of deaths remain missing 13 weeks after they occur (17).
That’s all I got.
9 Likes
I dunno about ironic, seems consistent with a long tradition of how Catholic bishops treat the public. As Archbishop Arnaud Amalric said in 1209:
“Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eiu.”
3 Likes
I know what they’re trying to say, but has this ever NOT been true? 
“The population is aging every week…”
2 Likes
Yes, though “dramatically” may not be the best word for it. What happened was that, of the older people who make up a higher proportion of the US population (because of the baby boom), those who did not die directly from COVID died at a rate that is expected for their age. The flawed estimates of excess deaths in 2020 were flawed because they pegged the expected deaths too low: they used death rates from recent years only, and failed to recalibrate the expected deaths to take account of the increased number of old people in the population in 2020. That increase in the elderly population did not have to be particulary “dramatic” to throw off the estimates. It was enough to account for almost all of the higher death count that was misconstrued as excess.
5 Likes
It isn’t “Darwinism” when the elderly die. Natural selection means that certain individuals/genetic combinations are removed from the gene pool before they breed.
5 Likes
So you may end up having two souls. One you were born with and one injected into your arm.
It’s like being a cannibal and having a little bit of everyone’s soul you’ve eaten.
2 Likes
They can use the St Ronnie approach, he and Nancy were so “pro-life” they were against stem cell research until he got dementia and then the about face.
5 Likes
No matter how objective and scientific the data, if it’s not from Sean Hannity and Rupert Murdoch, the wing nuts won’t believe it. If Fox was in Russia it would be the Tass News Agency.