COVID Mountains or COVID Molehills
3 years into COVID, CBC is still trying to whip up hysteria rather than provide a balanced perspective
I am on the email list for a bicycle club run by an old friend. He’s a great guy, but is a regular imbiber of mainstream media, and thus has had a steady diet of COVID fear pornography for over 3 years. The following CBC article “informing” the public about COVID was included as a link at the end of his most recent newsletter.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/nova-scotia-covid-19-deaths-seniors-2023-1.6742493
I found this article DEEPLY disturbing, both in its hysterical tone, and by the way it presents statistics with no context or explanation. This article is actual “misinformation”, even though the government is currently attempting to define misinformation as any discussion of vaccine side effects, elevated death rates, or criticism of ongoing mask policies or vaccine mandates.
Note the subtitle: the COVID death rate for over-70’s is 280 times the death rate of under-50’s. Obviously this is designed to panic older people (or those who care about them) regarding the risk of COVID. But it is a distorted and hysterical view of the data.
(As an aside, isn’t it odd that COVID deaths could still be high even after nearly 100% of at-risk seniors have been injected with a “Safe and Effective” treatment?)
All common health risks are age stratified
“Age stratification” is a term in epidemiology that refers to the fact that many diseases or health risks vary by how old you are. Very few 90 year olds die by crashing their motorcycle, a risk which is highest in young men. Very few young people die of dementia - a risk that increases greatly with age.
Most disease risks increase greatly with age. For instance, the risk of death from prostate cancer for over-70’s is hundreds of times greater than under-50’s. Stroke risk is not hundreds, but dozens of times higher with advancing age.
Name any common cause of death (ie: not motorcycle crashes, but cancer, heart disease, dementia, etc) and it increases greatly with age. The hard fact is that, as we age, our risk of death increases each year. A 75 year old has a lot higher chance of dropping dead sometime this year than does a 35 year old. That’s just nature.
Once you are 75-84 years old, you are overall about 10 times as likely to die (COVID or no COVID!) as someone who is 45-54, and over 300 times as likely to die as someone who is 5-14. Every hour older, we are an hour closer to our death. (Sorry, this is getting depressing…)
Pneumonia is the old man’s friend, and often on the first line of the death certificate
The risk of death from respiratory viruses, and especially coronaviruses (which have been around as long as humans have been around) is particularly age-stratified. Coronavirus OC43, for instance, has always been a threat to frail seniors, and circulates most winters. But nobody ever heard or cared about it because - like COVID - it mainly carries off weakened older people with serious health conditions and comorbidities - ie: people who are near death.
Respiratory viruses are the final “coup de grace” that end people’s lives when they have what we used to call “old age” but now we call “multi-organ failure”. Prior to COVID, we accepted these deaths as normal. We understood that humans are finite. There are only so many grains of sand in our hourglass when we are born. We reach the end of our time, and we die.
“Old Age” is not an acceptable entry in the “Immediate Cause of Death” line on a death certificate. (I learned that early in my career!) Something has to go there, even for a 101-year-old, even when the death is expected, even when it is a mercy and not a tragedy. So the final trigger - a heart arrhythmia, dehydration, or often a respiratory infection like COVID or pneumonia - gets written in.
Is COVID shortening lives?
There is currently a little bit of a joke behind the scenes with docs and those who understand the stats. The most recent data in NS show that the average age of a “COVID death” is now 84. That is a few years longer than the average lifespan of a Nova Scotian. So apparently catching COVID can actually make you live LONGER! Of course it doesn’t mean that, but what that average age of 84 DOES suggest is that COVID is not shortening lives.
The relevant question with COVID that seniors should be asking is not “how much more risky is this for me than for a young person”. Because the answer, as I’ve explained above is “Like every other potential cause of death, I am far more at risk than a young person”. The right question is “How much does the fact that COVID is now endemic change my odds of dying”.
The answer is “not significantly”, and probably “not at all”. Even during the initial bloom of COVID, when seniors were at very high risk relative to now, the increase in overall mortality rate for seniors was less than 10%.
But independent of COVID, risk of death increases by about 10% per year (roughly) as we age. Thought of another way, if you were 70 years old at the worst part of the COVID pandemic, your risk of dying increased to that of a 71-year-old when COVID came to your community. But most 70 year olds don’t panic on their 71st birthday - in fact they celebrate it - even though getting another year older increases the risk of death as much as COVID did (but no longer does!).
But to think of personal risk more accurately, one must look at risks individually. Not every 70-year-old is the same. Most of the seniors who died of COVID were in nursing homes or significantly unwell. They were not the senior’s on my friend’s bicycle club email list. Seniors well enough to consider a bike ride or hike are FAR less likely than average to be seriously ill or die if they get COVID. In fact, I do not personally know of a well, robust senior who died from COVID. My personal experience is that with almost every person I saw pass from COVID, their families felt their death was a relief and a release, and not a tragedy. “He/she didn’t want to live that way any longer”, was the common refrain.
Well seniors had much less reason to be frightened than unwell seniors - a piece of information that the media did NOT impart to the public. (It’s almost as if they had an agenda… ?)
For a very good discussion of the issue of COVID risk for seniors from the former chief Medical Officer of Health of Ontario, who is a senior himself, you can listen here:
People Die. That’s Life.
Put another way, even at the height of COVID, only about 3-4% of deaths were from COVID. 96-97% of deaths were from heart attacks, strokes, cancer, and all the same old boring things that we don’t panic or change our lives for. And out of those 3-4% of deaths that were marked as COVID, many were WITH, not FROM COVID. That is to say, they were people that fate had destined to die at that time one way or another, and were not EXCESS deaths - COVID was on their death certificate, but...
In Canada, as we counted more deaths as being from COVID, rates of death from things like cancer and dementia magically went DOWN. COVID was obviously not a cure for cancer or dementia. Although there were people who truly died prematurely from COVID, what mainly changed was what we doctors wrote on death certificates, but not the date of death of those individuals.
COVID has changed
The risk presented by COVID has fallen GREATLY as the original virus was displaced by several iterations of variants. The excess risk of death presented currently by COVID has fallen to a tiny fraction of that 10% increase mentioned above, and is likely now zero. ie: your risk of death is the same now as it was in 2019, so chill out.
Current variants are LESS deadly than a typical flu. Recent data shows that 98% of Canadians currently show signs of immunity to COVID, either from immunization, or more likely from previous infection. This hugely decreases the risks of a bad outcome resulting from a future infection. Interestingly, odds are pretty good that even if you think you weren’t infected, you actually were exposed and have immunity.
As an aside, if people believe the vaccine works, does it make sense to remain hysterical even after getting 2 vaccines, and in some cases 3 or 4 boosters?
Life is risky. Deal with it.
We do things that increase our risk of death by 10% on a regular basis. We step into slippery bathtubs. We ride our bicycles. We drive to Florida, or to visit family. We eat cheesecake for dessert. We don’t exercise enough. Some of us smoke, which increases risk of death by FAR more than 10%.
So why do we freak out about the risk of COVID, while taking risks every minute of every day in every aspect of our lives?
Some apparent contradictions are actually not
It is hard for people to hold these 2 things in their head at once, but they can be simultaneously true:
1) COVID is indeed 280 times as risky for someone over 70 than under 50
2) If you are over 70, your risk of death is the same now as it was before COVID reared its spiky head, so it’s safe to go out and live your life as you always did.
Free Advice - go back to living normal life, because life is short
Many times information comes with the preface: “Consult your doctor. This is not meant to be medical advice”. Sadly the medical profession has shown (especially since COVID) that rather than trusting a doctor’s advice, you should think for yourself. I suggest you do so. But here is my advice, for what it’s worth (free!)
Your risk of death is pretty much exactly the same as it was before COVID (other than the risks imposed by things like ambulance delays and lack of access to treatments in our failing healthcare system!). So live your life to the fullest. Treasure whatever time you have left - be it a day, or 50 more years. Ride a bike, go for a walk, eat good food, socialize with your family and friends. Hug the ones you love! If working in ER for 2 decades has taught me anything, it’s that every day is a blessing to be cherished.
Remember that physical fitness and a healthy lifestyle are HIGHLY protective against COVID. Unfit seniors account for the vast majority of COVID deaths. Taking care of your health will keep you much safer from COVID than will hiding in your house.
Enough with the masks already!
If you didn’t wear masks in 2019, stop wearing them. They are bad for our mental health, and they don’t work (as this authoritative review has confirmed - AGAIN !!)
Masks are a political statement, not a medical intervention, and hey just make us all more paranoid.
End of Rant…
Your odds of dying prematurely in a car crash are higher than they are of dying prematurely from COVID. And by that I don’t suggest you stop driving, I suggest you stop worrying about COVID.
I realize this was a diatribe, but the ongoing misinformation and complete lack of perspective is driving me mad, and the CBC article is perfectly illustrative of why they have lost public trust. If you still have COVIDians in your family or circle of friends, please send them this article. Perhaps it can give them some perspective.
I returned from UK, where masks are uncommon now, to NS, to find many maskers still. Medical and dental facilities are still insisting on masks, apparently by order of colleges and health authorities and today at the local post office a lady arrived masked alone in her car and rolled down her sleeve over her hand to touch the outside door and used her elbow to press the disabled button inside. Exposed to Canadian TV at the gym I noticed a daytime women's audience sported several masks. The main demographic in shops is older women, then young women and older men. There is likely a correlation at least with getting news primarily from the state media. A social control, project fear induced neurosis in a very compliant population. The project fear psyops has been successful beyond the authoritarians' wildest dreams and they'll have masks and lockdowns back in a heartbeat. Perhaps we should name it Strang syndrome.
Another excellent, balanced, logical and rational article filled with actual context perspective and facts! Hope you shared it with every member of that bicycle club !