Comments by "Brandon M" (@brandonm949) on "Conservative Leader Shares Laughable 'Pro-Worker' Message" video.

  1. What about the 254,000 excess deaths in the U.S. since February 1st? Where did those come from if not COVID? Shouldn't we be concerned that deaths are 14% higher than normal for no reason? And what about other countries? Are they faking it too? We got Iran, Israel, Palestine, and Saudi Arabia to work together to perpetrate this fraud? Did we reach world peace and I missed it?
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  2.  @youngatheart-rq6ic  If you have a more reliable source for counting deaths than the CDC, you're welcome to share it.
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  3.  @whyamimrpink78  True, some of the deaths are probably caused by the crisis part of the COVID crisis. The dashboards I've been looking at don't have those listed so I'll have to do some digging to see what those numbers are. As for your second point, the deaths that would've happened anyway aren't counted in the excess deaths - they're part of the baseline. And two of the comorbidities are obesity and hypertension. 40% of American adults are obese, and 45% have hypertension. Throw in diabetes, asthma, COPD, etc. and you're probably talking about 60% of American adults that have a comorbidity. It's not just immunocompromised people and a bunch of old folks at risk. There's a bunch of relatively healthy people in there too.
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  4.  @whyamimrpink78  I love how you dismissed the CDC's numbers and then immediately used a CDC statistic. Good stuff. But if you want to split the blame (something no one has ever done when talking about how many deaths are caused by something), then let's do that. Now we have a significant increase in deaths from diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and dementia. Which would also be something to worry about, no? That's the beauty of excess deaths. It doesn't care what you blame the deaths on. It just says, "254,000 more people have died than what would usually happen." Given that the biggest change this year has been the presence of COVID, that's probably the thing we need to address to fix the rise in deaths. And by "relatively" healthy, I'm referring to people with diseases that aren't immediately life threatening or can be managed without much effort. Most people with obesity, diabetes, or hypertension live for decades with those conditions. So it's ridiculous to discount COVID deaths in people with these conditions, because most of them would have lived through the year (and likely many years) if they hadn't gotten COVID. Which, again, is what the excess death stat is. Deaths that weren't going to happen.
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  5.  @whyamimrpink78  Haven't we known for a while that underlying conditions played a big part in COVID deaths? The CDC just had a nice new chunk of data and released some tables about it. The 6% thing wasn't a big revelation; it was just a fun fact above the comorbidities table. I don't know what you even mean by "adjust for the deaths". And there are a shit ton of comorbidities listed, with associated ICD-10 codes. It's very specific. Check it out (it's Table 3): https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm?fbclid=IwAR3-wrg3tTKK5-9tOHPGAHWFVO3DfslkJ0KsDEPQpWmPbKtp6EsoVV2Qs1Q It's a lot harder to find suicide and overdose deaths; these numbers usually take a year or two to get released. In a normal year, there are about 40,000 total gun deaths, 25,000 non-gun suicides, and 72,000 overdose deaths. I found a stat where homicides increased by 24% and one where overdose deaths increased by 13%. If we make it a nice, simple 25% increase all around, we get 34,250 for a full year, or about 20,000 from February 1 to early September. That's a significant number, but it also doesn't put much of a dent in 254,000. I ignored your nursing home stat because while it may be relevant to discussing the official COVID death count, it means nothing when talking about excess deaths. The people who were already going to die aren't in that count. As for comorbidities, it sounds to me like you don't think the deaths of high-risk people count, which is a weird thing we never do when talking about deaths. I've never heard anyone say, "140,000 people die from strokes every year, but most of them had heart disease so it's really like 20,000." If you're alive, get COVID, don't recover, and then die, that's a death caused by COVID, plain and simple. What else would you say is responsible for 254,000 excess deaths?
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