0.07% of reported COVID-19 fatalities. There are a lot of incentives to keep the numbers down going up the chain in the Chinese bureaucracy. This is the opposite of most western countries, where the incentives are to over-report.
Yes, that's news about Florida and Donald Trump. Now do New York and California. The most populous states were likely over-reporting deaths.
By the way, despite the rhetoric, states were getting money from the federal government for reporting a COVID death. There was literally a per-death payment. If that is not an incentive to over-report (despite the usual bloviating from Republicans), I don't know what is.
> Inpatient Prospective Payment System (IPPS) Hospitals - Section 3710 of the CARES Act directs the Secretary to increase the weighting factor of the assigned Diagnosis-Related Group (DRG) by 20 percent for an individual diagnosed with COVID-19 discharged during the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency (PHE) period.
Hospitals get to charge Medicare/Medicaid a 20% surcharge for COVID patients and COVID deaths.
Note that this is deaths and patients who test positive for COVID while at the hospital, not deaths/patients whose reason for being in the hospital is COVID. At one point, those were all counted as "COVID hospitalizations/deaths" respectively by the CDC.
Given that COVID tests are tuned to have high sensitivity and (comparatively) low specificity, all a hospital needs to do to get their hands on that money is just give out a lot of COVID tests, and avoid re-testing the false positives. COVID tests are cheap, and to patients, it looks like the hospital being extra careful about keeping them safe from COVID.
That doesn't pay hospitals 20% more, the MS-DRG weighting factor is used to calculate the resources needed to care for the patient. This document is simply acknowledging the complexity and cost of COVID-19 care.
I don't expect anyone who has swallowed the pandemic conspiracy theories to change their mind. Perhaps someone who is reading along will gain insights into how misinformation starts and is spread.
And that MS-DRG premium means that they get $0 extra? Maybe it's less than 20% extra, and maybe it's more, but I certainly doubt that it's $0.
It sounds a lot like you were presented with evidence that people, particularly hospital administrators, were incentivized to pump the numbers of COVID cases in the US, and dismissed it as a "conspiracy theory."
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The fact of the matter is that people respond to incentives. Whether consciously or not. When you pay people to hand out COVID diagnoses, you are going to get a lot of COVID diagnoses. Particularly, you are going to get people who accept false positives as true positives.
Note that this doesn't mean that they over-counted cases in total: the US likely still under-counted cases due to all the people who never took a test when they were sick. They just under-counted a lot less than many other countries, thanks in part to the incentives being in favor of producing positive test results. Past epidemics have had reporting rates well under 10% in countries with good surveillance.
In China, the incentives are different. Chinese administrators are heavily incentivized to have fewer COVID diagnoses. This means much more draconian lockdown policies (which reduce the number of true positives for COVID), but it also means that they will accept negative test results (true and false negatives) without much question and try very hard to eliminate false positives.
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IMO the most likely story ("conspiracy theory") is:
1. The US and Western Europe, which had similar disease management policies and similar levels of contact between people, likely had very similar true positive rates of cases.
2. China probably had a lower true positive rate due to using more serious procedures to reduce R.
3. Due to co-morbidities (Americans being fat), cases in the US were on average more serious than cases in the EU, meaning more infected people going to the hospital and more people taking tests. On its own, this raised the reporting rate in the US.
4. Hospital systems and doctors in the US followed their incentives and over-reported cases (still under-counting the actual number of total cases by a factor of at least 2). What could have been "you have a mild cold, go home and get some rest" turned into "better take a COVID test just to be safe," and if that test was positive, it was reported as a case.
5. Hospital systems and doctors in China followed their incentives and under-reported cases (under-counting total cases by a factor of 50+). Things that could be COVID cases, but were unlikely, would get swept under the rug without a test.
6. Hospital systems in the EU ended up somewhere in between the US and China in terms of their surveillance rate.
This logically explains the variance in the reported case numbers between countries that did the same things, and also explains why a rational person could be skeptical of official numbers in certain countries. But sure, offering a narrative that lines up better with reality than the official narrative is a "conspiracy theory." As we all know, the official narrative is always correct, even when it is "there are WMDs in Iraq" or "smoking has no adverse heath effects."
Making the statement "The most populous states were likely over-reporting deaths" is alarmist to say the least.
Upon challenge, dialed back to "over-reported cases" or even "under-counted a lot less than many other countries" or "[didn't] try very hard to eliminate false positives" (which is a very strange accusation for different reasons?), still sounds like you have an ideological axe to grind here.
If I remember rightly we even know and have evidence of some of the specific ways in which China did this, such as not counting deaths of people in high-risk groups immediately after being infected with and hospitalized due to Covid as Covid deaths and instead blaming their deaths on some existing health conditions. Whereas the UK for example counted everyone who died reasonably soon after catching Covid as a Covid death.
we don't need to rely on the numbers coming from the CCP to get an estimate of how bad it is in china. what we can do is to rely on the covid count of passengers coming in from China, reported by non-Chinese disease authorities. we have several: south korea, singapore, and taiwan who were taking in chinese travelers at various points of the pandemic. china is a minor contributor to imported cases in these three countries.
If people don't like the China example, they can look at New Zealand or Australia, both of which had tiny fractions of our Covid deaths AND experienced less economic decline AND experienced a drop in suicides during the time.
New Zealand had the equivalent of 2000 US deaths yesterday. Australia 1500. The vaccines didn't keep people from dying, they postponed them to the next flu season.
The old and sick will catch covid and die. There is nothing you can do about it. Putting your head in the sand and hoping for a magic bullet to save us - vaccines, masks, lockdowns - just means that the rest of the health system will collapse too. We need to be realistic and prepare for a world in which life expectancy is 10 years lower and we need a lot more hospital beds.
That a simple statement of fact is bait ought to tell you how much of a fantasy world people live in.
The covid vaccines are shit and don't work.
End of story.
The mental gymnastics needed to claim they do fall apart when you compare them to vaccines for any other deadly disease. We don't still have small pox running rampant in countries with 90%+ vaccination rates. No one walks around telling you that having only your face paralyzed by polio is a great out come and a reason why we should vaccinate toddlers. If you get the MMR vaccine you're not told to be happy that you only got one of the three.
We need to move people's minds to the real world where everyone gets covid during flu season, rename it covid season while we're at it, and build a hospital system to solve that problem.
Contradicting hard medical evidence about reduced negative outcomes of the COVID vaccine that the entire medical industry has consensus around is just crank stuff at best.
The vaccines are unreasonably effective given how radically the virus has mutated.
The argument that things had to go this way, that we should just lay down our arms from the outset, throw immunocompromised, children and old folks under the bus, and treat it like "flu season" (which has a vaccine for f's sake!) has bequeathed our massive world-wide (or at least west-wide) gain-of-function laboratory that is bringing powerful new mutations to a geo near you.
Track-and-trace and countless bog-standard public health responses (like requiring masks on planes for f's sake), and yes the occasional lockdown, PLUS the fact that we got lucky on how fast we got vaccines delivering measurable improvement in outcomes, would have been a powerful combo. But it wouldn't have made any money.
Surely they aren't covering up that many deaths right? The US is 4% of the world population, and represents 16% of the fatalities. If China had our rate of fatalities that would indicate that they are hiding 4.3 million deaths somehow.
Last year the Economist estimated them at about 1.7 million excess mortality. There is extremely strong pressure from the top down to minimize the public death count. The credibility of the party (and Xi personally) relies on their Zero Covid policy being seen as effective. I wouldn't even call it a cover up, there are just no incentives to accurately report and many reasons to downplay aggressively.
There is no value in the Chinese approach. Protecting people from infectious disease can't possibly justify violating fundamental human rights, such as the right to free assembly?
Do you support the right of the polio-infected resident of Rockland County (a NYC suburb) to attend tonight’s basketball game? Would you be okay with him shopping at your grocery store, standing in line with you at the cash register?
No. There is always some sort of infectious disease going on. Even before COVID-19, thousands of people died every year from influenza and other respiratory diseases (including other corona viruses). This is not a valid reason for imposing restrictions and mandates.
Sure, not rhinovirus but definitely polio. Surely you aren't proposing that anyone ever tried to limit free assembly for run-of-the-mill germs. Point being, your rights exist in tension with public health; they are not absolute.
