Uncounted COVID Deaths? The CDC’s Contradictory Pneumonia and Influenza Death Numbers

This presentation discusses the CDC’s contradictory weekly and annual pneumonia and influenza deaths. Even the latest (as of April 14, 2020) weekly death numbers show fewer deaths in 2020 than comparable weeks last year (2019) despite the Coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic. Given asymptomatic carriers and inadequate testing in the United States, one would expect a surge in reported pneumonia and influenza deaths.

Remarkably summing the weekly pnemonia and influenza deaths gives about 180,000 annual deaths from pneumonia and influenza, over THREE TIMES the widely cited 55,000 “influenza and pneumonia” deaths from the annual leading causes of death report.

These numbers raise troubling questions about the CDC and its collection, analysis and reporting of pneumonia and influenza numbers. The low number of weekly deaths compared to last year could indicate that there may be many uncounted COVID deaths, or that the disease is much less deadly than popular reports, or several other possibilities with substantially different public health implications. The numbers need to be clarified as soon as possible.

Both a video version and a written PDF version are provided below. The written version is generally faster to read and includes references and some additional technical details.

NOTE: If you are concerned about these odd numbers, please consider sharing this post by e-mail, a link on your web site or blog, or other methods in addition to advertising-funded and other big company social media. My post of this on Hacker News soared for a few hours and then was flagged and shut down, for example. I have also encountered social media mobs that engage in name calling and do not address the substantive issues.

Video Presentation

The video is also available at BitChute: https://www.bitchute.com/video/wXvokey7AYj3/

Slides and Written Text with References (PDF Document)

UPDATE:

Links: The NCHS data file is: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/weeklyarchives2019-2020/data/NCHSData14.csv

The weekly pneumonia and influenza deaths page/section is: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/#S2

The FluView sub-page is: https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/fluview/mortality.html

The Final Deaths Report for 2017 is: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr68/nvsr68_09-508.pdf

See Table B on page six(6) with the leading causes of death. See item 8 “influenza and pneumonia”

Companion Video showing CDC Web Site on April 15, 2020 showing the analysis in a spreadsheet: https://youtu.be/UY-ULcQM0jY

CDC Cold vs Flu Web Site Archival Video: https://youtu.be/xF1_LSH0-Xk

In case the CDC Pneumonia and Influenza weekly deaths web site changes.

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(C) 2020 by John F. McGowan, Ph.D.

About Me

John F. McGowan, Ph.D. solves problems using mathematics and mathematical software, including developing gesture recognition for touch devices, video compression and speech recognition technologies. He has extensive experience developing software in C, C++, MATLAB, Python, Visual Basic and many other programming languages. He has been a Visiting Scholar at HP Labs developing computer vision algorithms and software for mobile devices. He has worked as a contractor at NASA Ames Research Center involved in the research and development of image and video processing algorithms and technology. He has published articles on the origin and evolution of life, the exploration of Mars (anticipating the discovery of methane on Mars), and cheap access to space. He has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).