Covid Death Overestimation

Sep 23, 2023

Intro

In the section Covid in Sweden in the Culture War Encyclopedia we include something that should be highlighted on it’s own. That is the overestimation of how many people died from Covid-19 by the public and the media.

Public’s Overestimation of Covid Deaths

On April 12, 2022, UnHerd published Sweden’s inconvenient Covid victory by Johan Anderberg who asks,

Were millions of people denied their freedom for nothing?

They go on to discuss how wrong the general public is about how many people supposedly died from Covid. They report that in the Spring and Summer of 2021 a global consultant firm called Kek-

As we were saying before we were interrupted by premature laughter, they are called Kekst CNC, not Kek, but Kekst CNC and in the Spring and Summer of 2021, they reportedly conducted a study of people in France, Germany, Japan, Sweden, UK and USA in which they were asked questions about Covid and society. They state,

The twelfth and final topic in the survey contained two questions: “How many people in your country have had the coronavirus? How many people in your country have died?” At the same time as increasingly reliable figures were trickling in with regard to the actual deadliness of Covid-19, there was now a study of the number that people believed had died.
In the US, the average guess in mid-July was that 9% of the population had died. If that had been true, it would have corresponded to almost 30 million Americans deaths. The death toll was thus overestimated by 22,500% — or 225 times over. In the UK as well as in France and Sweden, the death toll was exaggerated a hundredfold. The Swedish guess of 6% would have corresponded to 600,000 deaths in the country. By then, the official death toll was more than 5,000 and inching closer to 6,000.
Reporting the average guess was perhaps a little misrepresentative, as some people replied with very high numbers. In the UK, the most common answer was that around 1% of the population had died — in other words, a lot less than the 7% average. But it was still a figure that overestimated the number of deaths more than tenfold. At this point, 44,000 Brits had been registered dead — or around 0.07% of the population.
The breakdown of the numbers further showed that more than a third of the Brits responded with a figure of over 5% of the population. This would have been like the whole population of Wales dropping dead. It would have meant many times more Brits dying of Covid-19 than during the entire Second World War — civilian and military casualties included.
The war rhetoric brandished by the leaders of the world had had an impact. Their citizens really did believe they were living through a war. Then, two years into the pandemic, the war ended. There were no longer any foreign journalists at the Swedish Public Health Agency’s press conferences. No Americans, Brits, Germans, or Danes asked why schools were staying open, or why the country hadn’t gone into lockdown.
In large part, this was because the rest of the world had quietly begun to live with the new virus. Most of the world’s politicians had given up hope on both lockdowns and school closures. And yet, considering all those articles and TV segments that had been produced about Sweden’s foolishly libertarian attitude to the pandemic, considering the way some data sources had been referenced daily by the world’s media, this sudden lack of interest was strange.

Media’s Overestimation of Covid Deaths

It is amusing to see media reporting on how much the public overestimates these deaths, comparing the official figures with what people think the figures are. But the official figures themselves are inflated.

As I show in Doing the Math - In this piece, I combine everyone's 2 favorite things - math and covid! (August 16, 2021), the CDC told medical facilities that if a patient dies, they can record the death as being caused by Covid-19 if the patient is assumed to have died from Covid-19 or assumed to have died with Covid-19. They did not have to test to see if the patient had Covid-19. The patient could hae died from a heat attack but if they assumed the person had Covid-19 when they died from the heart attacik, they should record the death as having been caused by Coivd-19.

Keep in mind that there was a profit motive to falsify these documents. Now the CDC gave medical facilities license to falsify death records and statistics!

Will the public ever gain a more realistic picture of how many people died from Covid-19? Does the public even want to know?

Culture War Encyclopedia

Covid Death Overestimation

Intro

Public’s Overestimation of Covid Deaths

Media’s Overestimation of Covid Deaths

FURTHER READING

last update 2023-09-22

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