CLARIFICATION: According to Lead Stories, Italy has not changed its official number on overall COVID deaths in the country. Instead, the Italian government began publishing data that breaks down that number into those who died of COVID with comorbidities, such as obesity and heart disease, and those who died of COVID alone with no comorbidities. The point of this article is the vital distinction between dying directly from COVID and with COVID — a distinction Italy’s reporting finally makes clear. And it’s quite revealing. No one is saying COVID isn’t a killer, because it is. The real measure of COVID is “excess deaths,” which in this country exceeded 500,000 in 2020. While some of those excess deaths were due to increases in suicides and drug overdoses during the shutdown and its attendant pressures, the vast majority were COVID-related. In other words, COVID hastened by months or years the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans who, despite having serious comorbidities, weren’t yet ready to go. What the new reporting standards from Italy tell us is that we can say with about 97% certainty exactly who is at risk.
Italy’s Institute of Health now counts only those who died from COVID-19 has having died from COVID-19, reducing COVID-19 deaths in the hard-hit country from over 130,000 to fewer than 4,000.
That’s a 97% decrease in those who died “from” COVID.
“Of the … 130,468 deaths registered as official COVID deaths since the start of the pandemic, only 3,783 are directly attributable to the virus alone,” reports Summit News.
As the Daily Sceptic’s Toby Young wrote on Thursday, “All the other Italians who lost their lives had from between one and five pre-existing diseases. Of those aged over 67 who died, 7% had more than three co-morbidities, and 18% at least two.”
PJ Media has been publishing articles since at least last summer, reminding readers of the vast difference between dying from COVID and dying with COVID. I concluded around that time that COVID kills almost exclusively those — and I hope this still doesn’t sound too callous — who were already on their way out the door.
It only took a year and a half, but now the Italian Institute of Health has confirmed what many of us already knew.
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According to the CDC, 746,705 Americans have died with COVID. If we apply Italy’s new rule, the actual death count is only around 22,000 or so.
That’s not even a mild flu season.
I’m not here to belittle those who have lost loved ones, or who have been hospitalized with what is still a very nasty respiratory infection.
I am here to repeat what I’ve been saying for a year: COVID-19 is a very picky killer, and we know exactly who its prey is: the old, the infirm, the malnourished, and the morbidly obese.
“Protect the vulnerable,” I’ve written time and time again, and leave the rest of us alone.
We’ve seen the science.
Who will actually follow it?
