One testable assumption that is currently in vogue is that COVID is causing a lot of the excess death which we’ve been seeing. It’s part of an official narrative which says that COVID is super-deadly and that we shouldn’t even ever try to compare it to the seasonal flu (and people who do make such comparisons need to be shouted down).
A nice thing about COVID is that it has been becoming less lethal over time. Some of the drop in lethality may be due to better or more rational medical treatments than the medical treatments which were performed (allowed) in 2020 and early 2021.
UK data “proves” that COVID is no longer very lethal
But in the UK where the treatments were pretty stable and the data were pretty detailed, you can see — from almost 700,000 COVID infections followed through time, in order to see if the infected person lived or died — that Delta variant COVID was only about 42% as lethal as variants which came before (e.g., Alpha variant).
You can also see, if you look hard, that Omicron variant is only about 31% as lethal as Delta variant — so that, by implication, Omicron variant is only 13% as lethal as Alpha variant.
Omicron variant COVID is not even as deadly as the median seasonal flu.
But death data do not match up with the virulence of COVID, which indicates that something else — something besides COVID — has been killing millions of people worldwide.
A Simple Model
The problem with simple models is that they are pretty much guaranteed to be wrong, or are guaranteed to “miss the mark” at least a little bit — because of oversimplifying a problem.
The problem with models which are too complex though, is that they are often right for the wrong reasons, overcomplicating the problem and leading us away from useful information.
The nice thing about simple models is that, though wrong on the precise details, they are not as likely to lead you away from useful information. Simple models almost always make reality more “clear” — while complex models have the potential to make things more “cloudy”, or allow for the researchers’ biases to creep into the data.
I created a simple model which steps down the infection fatality rate (IFR) for COVID infections as new variants came to dominate — using the specific variant dominance in several large nations for time points — while keeping the yearly attack rate constant at 25% of the population of the earth.
Response to Critics
Critics may say that’s too simple, because new variants are more transmissible, but offsetting that extra transmissibility is the fact of prior exposure of people who were formerly susceptible — with naturally-acquired immunity which has been shown to be much more potent than vaccines.
Also offsetting the increased transimissibility is the widespread use of better treatments now, given how prior treatment was so politicized and controlled by authorities dead set on giving us what they think we need — and giving it good and hard.
Alpha variant COVID is likely the worst-ever variant that hit Earth, even rivalling wild-type COVID in its ability to produce death. Non-Alpha variants circulating at the same time as Alpha in the UK could only create about half as much death as Alpha did — as the UK data clearly show.
Check out the expected excess death if Alpha variant had been the only variant before Delta:
The striking finding is that, with Omicron, over 90% of the recent deaths are unexplainable deaths — if you stay with the official narrative that the reason millions of people have been dying is because there is an acute respiratory disease which has been killing them, a disease called COVID.
At the stepped-down IFR for Omicron, to get to the point where COVID explained all of the excess deaths in the last 5 months would require 9.8 billion infections.
9.8 billion infections in 5 months?
Newsflash: There are only 7.8 billion people on the earth.
Are we to believe that the 5-month infection rate for the people of the earth in the last 5 months is 126%?
That’s 1.26 infections for every person on the planet, in 5 months of time.
COVID has likely killed almost 250,000 persons in the last 5 months, but the problem is that the excess death in that time has been estimated to be 2.9 million. Something killed 2.6 million out of that 2.9 million, but simple modeling reveals that it wasn’t COVID that killed them.
The most plausible reason that those 2.6 million died in the last 5 months is that they were killed by the medical treatments for COVID (i.e., the “vaccines”), not by the disease itself. Indeed, the VAERS data indicate that deaths from COVID vaccines are more than an order of magnitude higher than deaths from typical vaccines.
As a disease, COVID is no longer even as deadly as flu. As a vaccine, the COVID vaccine is over 10 times more dangerous than typical vaccines — such as flu vaccines.
Reference
[Coronavirus sequences by variant] -- OWID. https://ourworldindata.org/covid-cases
[Estimated Cumulative Excess Death during COVID] — The Economist data. OWID. Available: https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid
[25% annual attack rate for COVID] -- Ioannidis JPA. Reconciling estimates of global spread and infection fatality rates of COVID-19: An overview of systematic evaluations. Eur J Clin Invest. 2021 May;51(5):e13554. doi: 10.1111/eci.13554. Epub 2021 Apr 9. PMID: 33768536; PMCID: PMC8250317. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8250317/
"Acknowledging residual uncertainties, the available evidence suggests average global IFR of ~0.15% and ~1.5-2.0 billion infections by February 2021 ..."
[Delta dominant after 26 Jun 2021; Omicron dominant since 19 Dec 2021] — Shi DS, Whitaker M, Marks KJ, et al. Hospitalizations of Children Aged 5–11 Years with Laboratory-Confirmed COVID-19 — COVID-NET, 14 States, March 2020–February 2022. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep 2022;71:574-581. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm7116e1
[As of 19 Jan 2021, from 52,000 COVID infections with Alpha (SGTF) variant, there were 104 deaths, 1 death per 500 Alpha infections (IFR=0.20%)] — Page 3. Epidemiological findings. UK Technical Briefing #5 (PDF file). Available general: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/investigation-of-novel-sars-cov-2-variant-variant-of-concern-20201201
Available specific page: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/959426/Variant_of_Concern_VOC_202012_01_Technical_Briefing_5.pdf
"On 19/01/2021, ... 104 deaths among SGTF cases (0.2%), within 28 days of specimen date."
[In almost 700,000 cases confirmed by sequencing, Delta was only 42% as lethal as Alpha] — Table 3. Number of confirmed and probable cases by variant as of 11 October 2021. UK Technical Briefing #25. General page: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/investigation-of-sars-cov-2-variants-technical-briefings
Available specific page: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1025827/Technical_Briefing_25.pdf
[From 1.5 million confirmed cases, Omicron is 31% as lethal as Delta (IFR ~ 0.03%), making Omicron much safer than the seasonal flu] — Nyberg T, Ferguson NM, Nash SG, Webster HH, Flaxman S, Andrews N, Hinsley W, Bernal JL, Kall M, Bhatt S, Blomquist P, Zaidi A, Volz E, Aziz NA, Harman K, Funk S, Abbott S; COVID-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK) consortium, Hope R, Charlett A, Chand M, Ghani AC, Seaman SR, Dabrera G, De Angelis D, Presanis AM, Thelwall S. Comparative analysis of the risks of hospitalisation and death associated with SARS-CoV-2 omicron (B.1.1.529) and delta (B.1.617.2) variants in England: a cohort study. Lancet. 2022 Mar 16:S0140-6736(22)00462-7. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(22)00462-7. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 35305296; PMCID: PMC8926413. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8926413/
[Just 12 deaths from 37, 296 Omicron infections (1 death per 3108 infections)] — Ulloa AC, Buchan SA, Daneman N, Brown KA. Estimates of SARS-CoV-2 Omicron Variant Severity in Ontario, Canada. JAMA. 2022 Apr 5;327(13):1286-1288. doi: 10.1001/jama.2022.2274. PMID: 35175280; PMCID: PMC8855311. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2789408
[Lancet study showing 4471 reported deaths for 298.8 million vaccine doses (15 deaths per million doses)] — Safety of mRNA vaccines administered during the initial 6 months of the US COVID-19 vaccination programme: an observational study of reports to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System and v-safe. Available: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(22)00054-8/fulltext#%20
[Average rate of VAERS death reports over 11 years of observation was 1.1 deaths per million net doses distributed] — MMWR Surveill Summ. 2003 Jan 24;52(1):1-24. Surveillance for safety after immunization: Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS)--United States, 1991-2001. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss5201a1.htm
[“Time-to-death” probability for COVID. Upper bound of confidence interval around mean and SD indicate 89% of all deaths occur by Day 28] — Linton NM, Kobayashi T, Yang Y, et al. Incubation Period and Other Epidemiological Characteristics of 2019 Novel Coronavirus Infections with Right Truncation: A Statistical Analysis of Publicly Available Case Data. Journal of Clinical Medicine. 2020 Feb;9(2). DOI: 10.3390/jcm9020538. PMID: 32079150; PMCID: PMC7074197. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7074197/