As I predicted, despite the lockdown likely increasing the spread of the flu, including the coronavirus strand of the flu, the hot weather is killing it and we will be reaching double digit daily deaths by the first week of May.
At least 513 more people were killed by COVID-19 in the Big Apple in the past 24 hours — a grim number that nonetheless offered a ray of hope, as it was 209 fewer lives lost than the day before, city data released Saturday reveal.
The death toll in the five boroughs climbed to 12,712 with 126,368 total cases, up 4,220 from the day before, the city’s Department of Health revealed.
On Friday, 722 deaths were reported in the city, but the previous two days saw an increase of under 600 new deaths in the same 24-hour spans, the data shows.
The mortality total includes 8,448 New Yorkers whose COVID-19 cases were confirmed before their deaths, as well as 4,264 “probable” victims of the bug, those who showed symptoms of the illness.
I want to say again that these numbers are not real. As per CDC guidelines to just label virtually every death a corona death, these numbers include all respiratory virus deaths, as well as deaths from completely unrelated things.
The CDC released their last weekly flu death report on April 4, with the number at 24,000. They are now claiming that 24,000 might be their final number.
They had previously estimated, up through March, that the final number would be 50,000-60,000. If they finalize the non-corona flu deaths as being 24,000, that will mean that a likely 26,000-36,000 non-corona flu deaths have been attributed to corona to pad the numbers.
Despite all of this, as I predicted, the total number of US coronavirus deaths using these fake numbers is going to be under 60,000.
You add that to the 24,000 flu deaths, and you still have a number below the 80,000 who died in the 2017-18 flu season.
I have no doubt that in the summer, they will take whatever their final count is and double or triple it. So expect to see that. But that will not be a real number.
All of this was done for no reason.
As we know, the overwhelming majority of these deaths – like every flu season – are among the elderly. The second most affected group is the chronically or terminally ill (the third most affected group is the morbidly obese, which is why the blacks are being hit disproportionately in America). Typically, our society has accepted that these people are going to die of something, and we have not gone insane trying to protect them from the flu. However, if something has changed, and it was really important to keep the old and infirm from dying from this specific flu virus, so they will die of some other infection instead a few months later, then this is not what you would have done.
If we would have simply quarantined the nursing homes, using real quarantine measures, we could have prevented old people from dying of the flu without collapsing our economy.
Instead, we sent the people who work at nursing homes into the virus hotspots of the supermarkets – which are extremely overcrowded due to them being the only place people are allowed to go – where many of them got infected, before returning to the nursing home, without symptoms, to spread it to the old.