Abstract

 

A pandemic that commands the attention of the public, and action by the medical field, is one that sickens many people, overwhelms healthcare resources, and raises the total death rate above that of a typical year or season.  The COVID-19 era that began in early 2020 has received much attention in the United States for deaths that have occurred during this time.   Has COVID-19 resulted in more deaths (known as “excess deaths”) than would have happened in a typical year?   An obstacle to answering that question is that testing for COVID-19 is flawed from being both inaccurate and imprecise, for reasons discussed herein, and it is difficult to distinguish COVID-19 from other respiratory illnesses, due to symptoms and signs that are mostly indistinguishable from the common cold, flu or pneumonia.  It is possible that flu and pneumonia deaths, and perhaps others, have been ascribed to COVID-19, especially due to peculiarities in mortality reporting discussed below.

 

Therefore, year-over-year comparison of deaths from all causes is likely the best analysis of available evidence of whether the United States is now confronted by a deadly pandemic.

 

However, only 32 weeks have elapsed in 2020.  For each previous year, 52 weeks have already elapsed.  How then can we compare deaths from all causes in 2020 to previous years?  In this paper, I divide total deaths by number of weeks to arrive at number of deaths per week for each of the last 21 years, January 1, 2000 through August 8, 2020.

 

The US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) lists total deaths for many previous years.  The CDC also provides number of deaths from all causes in 2020.  On examination of the data for the first two decades of the 21st century in this paper, it is seen that the 2020 weekly total death rate in the US is the lowest in a decade, and second lowest in the 21st century so far.

 

 

 

Background

 

A pandemic is the prevalent spread of a disease over an entire country or worldwide, and there is often increased mortality for its duration compared to more typical years.  Early rises in death rate are a warning of an especially dangerous pandemic.  In 2020, it has been widely assumed that COVID-19 is a pandemic.

 

Understanding the COVID-19 phenomenon has been obstructed by several factors. 

 

COVID-19 is assumed to be caused by a coronavirus that is said to be novel, “SARS-CoV-2.”  However, SARS is likely a misnomer, because SARS is the acronym for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.  It is not at all clear that a majority of COVID-19 positive individuals have had acute respiratory distress with this illness.  Other factors, such as use of over-pressurized ventilators, have led to acute respiratory distress among those diagnosed with COVID-19.

 

The most confusing aspect of COVID-19 is reliance on a reverse transcriptase, polymerase chain reaction manufacturing technique (RT-PCR), now nearly universally re-purposed as a test for the presence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, although there are many problems with this test.  I outline these problems below:

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1. The very questionable applicability of the RT-PCR manufacturing technique for propagating RNA, now used throughout the world as a presumed test for presence of the particular infectious agent in question, or of other coronaviruses, other virions and virus particles that may resemble the SARS-CoV-2 infectious agent without distinction among those; and

2. The 80% false positive rate of nucleic acid testing in the diagnosis of COVID-19; (1) and

3. The arbitrary number of iterations of this test that must be selected to produce a positive result; and

4. Instructions given to physicians by the CDC to code cases as COVID-19 deaths including presumptively; (2) and

5. Controversy regarding higher Medicare and private insurance reimbursement for COVID-19 patients than for flu patients, (3) (4) which may have skewed reported cause of death on death certificates; and

6. Financial rewards to hospitals by the CARES Act for the number of COVID-19 patients they treat; and

7. Direct financial incentives to patients for positive COVID-19 test results; (5) and

8. The possibility that there may be political influences in altering the true number of deaths from COVID-19.

 

Therefore, in order to attain the truest picture of the impact of the COVID-19 on public health, it may be helpful to look at deaths from all causes, to see if there was a significant change.   Lack of a significant change in those numbers implies lack of lethality from any new cause.

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Methods

 

As of this writing, 32 weeks have elapsed in 2020.  However, for each previous year, 52 weeks have already elapsed.  How then can we compare deaths from all causes in 2020 to previous years? 

 

I divided the total number of deaths for each year by the number of weeks.  That is 52 weeks for all years, except for 2020, in which 32 weeks have elapsed as of this past Saturday, August 8, 2020, which is the most recently updated week in the CDC data cited.  This gives us the average number of deaths per week for each of those years, and allows a meaningful comparison between 2020 and prior years.

 

CDC data provides deaths from all causes for all previous years in the 21st century. (6) (7)  The CDC also provides data for all-cause deaths in 2020. (8)

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Results

 

Table 1

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