Posted an updated version of our paper on fixing the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC)’s problematic pneumonia, influenza, and COVID-19 (PIC) death numbers.
John F. McGowan, Ph.D., Tam Hunt, Josh Mitteldorf, PhD. Improving CDC Data Practices Recommendations for Improving the United States Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Data Practices for Pneumonia, Influenza, and COVID-19 (v 1.1). Authorea. November 29, 2021.
DOI: 10.22541/au.163822197.79126460/v1
Key points are:
o The CDC has at least three different estimates/counts of deaths from influenza and pneumonia before March 2020, two of which (FluView and the leading causes of death report) differ by a factor of over three. FluView attributes about 6-8 percent of deaths to pneumonia and influenza each year and the leading causes of death report attributes about 2 percent of deaths each year to pneumonia and influenza. The FluView numbers have been expanded to incorporate COVID deaths since March 2020.
o The likely cause of the discrepancy between the FluView and leading causes of death numbers is that the FluView numbers, based on the technical notes, count any death where pneumonia and/or influenza is listed as “a cause of death” whereas the leading causes of death report counts only deaths where pneumonia and/or influenza is listed as the “underlying cause of death.” Except for the fine print in the technical notes, the language, labels and titles on graphs etc., on both FluView and the leading cause of death reports state the deaths are caused by (“due to”) pneumonia and influenza.
o What does this mean for COVID? The CDC appears to have changed the criterion for assignment of underlying cause of death for COVID in their April 2020 COVID death certificate guidance to always assign COVID as the underlying cause of death even in cases of chronic lower respiratory disease and COPD (a subset of chronic lower respiratory disease usually meaning chronic bronchitis or emphysema). Hence the CDC’s deaths “from COVID” are probably comparable to the larger FluView deaths — about 188,000 deaths per year before March 2020 — or an even larger number due to the attribution of deaths to COVID that would be called heart attack or stroke deaths absent a positive COVID test or diagnosis. This supports but does not prove the hypothesis that COVID is largely a threat to a subset of vulnerable persons with preexisting serious health problems such as COPD and largely or entirely not a threat to the general healthy population; we do not state this in the paper but it is an obvious implication.
o Extensive failures to follow common scientific and engineering practice and use of confusing terminology. Lack of statistical and systematic errors, especially with respect to the assignment of a/the cause of death which many studies show is substantially uncertain — as appears illustrated by the discrepancy between the leading causes of death report and the FluView numbers. Frequent confusion between what is a model/estimate and what is a count.
(C) 2021 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).