Name: Alex Berneson Details How Coronavirus Deaths Are Counted
Uploaded: 2020-12-24T17:45:06.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Alex Berneson Details How Coronavirus Deaths Are Counted' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-12-24. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Alex Berneson Details How Coronavirus Deaths Are Counted' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-12-24. Transcript available.

the Joe Rogan experience so that's one issue with the death counting is that so
many of the people
so so let's say you're and I urge people one of the things that I've done a
couple times on Twitter
that always gets an interesting response is you can go look at coroner's
reports especially in
Milwaukee where they put them all online of people who've died so you can
actually see the people
who have died of COVID and you'll see how sick they are for the most part I'm
talking about people
in their 80s and 90s who have multiple severe comorbidities so in that case it's
really hard
to tell did this person die with COVID or from COVID you know if my heart is
failing and my kidneys
are failing and I get this thing and I die the next day okay I died did I die
did I die with COVID or
did I die two weeks before I would have died anyway and we're counting that as
from COVID or maybe even
a year before you would have died anyway but the 2.6 comorbidity factors that's
the average
right for people that died of COVID that's correct died with COVID that's a
good way of saying it
again it's very very hard to distinguish with and from in these cases of people
who are really sick
now sometimes it's not that way sometimes you can say again a 50 year old who
is relatively healthy
gets COVID they died they died from COVID okay COVID killed them we can agree
about that but at the
many of the cases are hard to hard to understand or not hard to understand but
hard to distinguish
and I'll make one more point about deaths very very very important point
PCR testing you you you know you I know I know you know you know you know what
this is but you you
know you you look for a sample of the virus in you know usually it's in in the
nose you multiply it
uh and you run a cycle where it doubles over and over and over again and when
it gets to a certain
point uh they actually it's it's actually incredible technology it's sort of it's
sort of magical but
they add a fluorescent marker to it and at some point if you can see the
fluorescence it's considered
a positive sample okay here's the thing a 40 cycle PCR test means that you are
multiplying the
original any original viral material in that sample by 1 trillion times okay so
a single
viral particle that you pick up becomes 1 trillion particles it is very very
easy to find virus in
people when you're running a PCR cycle at that at that level okay it does not
mean necessarily that
they're very sick at the time it doesn't even mean that they have active virus
in their bodies at the
time they could have a piece of virus that uh that that the that the original
sample is picking up and
multiplying by 40x okay it's clear by the way when people have a low threshold
let's say 20 times let's
say it only takes 20 cycles that's a million multiplications if you're positive
at 20 cycles
you're pretty sick if you're positive at 25 cycles you're probably pretty sick
if you're positive
at 30 cycles maybe not 40 cycles it doesn't really mean anything it means that
you have you know you
have this one bit of virus in you that they've managed to find does it mean you're
contagious it
probably doesn't mean you're contagious i don't like that word i don't like
that word probably well i'm around
grandma i i don't like to say never unless i'm sure okay right so when i say
probably it usually means
never but i just don't like saying i understand okay when we count deaths the
states have a procedure
most states they look at positive tests and they match them with death
certificates okay so let's say
you had a positive test okay in tomorrow okay and let's say it was 38 cycles
they're not going to tell
you that but it was 38 cycles okay you are not very sick at all with covid okay
but you're in a registry
somewhere your name's in a registry a month and a half later you die let's say
you get hit by a car
that will still initially come up as a positive covid death because you had a
positive test and you died
within a specific amount of time after having that test but they don't
distinguish from a violent
accident not not initially now some of the states are trying to clear this up
but let's say you died
of a heart attack joe okay a heart attack is a potential you know outcome of
covid you're always
going to be on there if you died of a heart attack so you're saying that if you
have this tiny amount
of covid in your system you never wind up getting sick but yet you have a heart
attack a couple weeks
later three four weeks later they will still call that a covid death one even
though you never got
sick from covid 100 that doesn't seem smart uh the idea is to capture deaths as
broadly as possible
the idea is this is a you know serious illness and we want to know every
possible person who's died from
it we don't do this with any other illness is it because they don't have the
resources differentiate
between the people that have died from heart attacks where it's clear oh we
looked at the person they
they had a very small amount of the virus in their system four weeks later
there's no way they were sick
from that but is that it's a function of decisions that have been made along
the way so they could have
set the pcr threshold at lower they could have set it at 30. they were aware
from almost the beginning
of this issue that you know you can find a comment from fauci in july talking
about this okay but and
certainly and you know and and certainly they knew well before this the idea
was we want to know
sort of as broadly as possible how many people have this and then secondarily
we want to define deaths
from covid as broadly as possible and what is the what is the level set out
currently um different
states have different levels but in most places it's 37 to 40 cycles which
again means that a lot of
those people at the high end are not sick and they they certainly had covet at
some point but they
probably don't have it anymore here's here's the other reason to do this show
if you if you set it
really high you're going to capture people on the way in just as they're
getting sick so if you're truly
afraid of we want to quarantine everybody really early then you have to set the
threshold really high so
so that to the extent there's a logic behind it that's the logic behind it but
it has all these
negative side effects um so there was one other point i want to make but i i'll
remember it in a
second but so the negative side effects would be that the they they're inflating
the number of people
that not just have it but die from it because of the fact that they're making
sure that these deaths
that get linked within a certain time period what is the time period so in some
states it's 30 days
in some states it's 60 days i don't know if it's more than 60 anywhere um but
but the states are
sort of allowed to define it oh here's okay so there's a negative for the
person who's tested
positive because you then have to isolate yourself you can't work you know you're
scared um and then
there's this negative for society with the death counts later right but isn't
that that negative
that you have to isolate yourself and you can't work that seems very rational
because if you do test
like let's say you're on the way in you catch it you have a little tiny bit of
it in your
system and they're like you have to isolate you have covet yes what if that
person just went out
and started drinking got run down the covet multiplies and then they have a
full-blown case
and then they start spreading so so that is look realistically can that happen
sometimes yes that
seems like that would happen a lot well it doesn't happen that much because at
37 you're asymptomatic so
you're not going to know unless you have some reason to be tested but isn't
there a significant
amount of spread from asymptomatic people so this is another argument that we
don't
there's asymptomatic spread it looks to be very rare although you know now fauci
is saying it's not so
rare there's pre-symptomatic spread pre-symptomatic spread appears to be more
real we need another
person other than fauci that's the one guy we do like everyone says fauci says
like we have this guy yes
uh let me let me say one more thing about death count yeah okay okay back in
march and april people
said covet deaths are being undercounted we don't we're not doing enough
testing there's all these
people dying they're being called pneumonia deaths it's probably covet that was
probably true at the
time especially in new york and new jersey you you can look and you can see the
number of what are called
excess deaths more people dying than you would expect in a normal year was
higher than the number of
covet deaths okay and a lot of those deaths were in people who had pneumonia
okay so that looks like
hey we didn't even you know this is even worse than we thought we're capturing
uh we're not even
capturing everybody who died okay but that was march and april let's talk about
what's happening now
we know the pcr tests are going to capture a lot of people who aren't sick
anymore and who maybe never
were sick we know that some of those people are going to be classified as covet
deaths if they again
i'm 88 i i somehow you know was asymptomatic a month ago i but i got a positive
pcr test now i die
because i'm 88 that's a covet death okay what we're seeing now in the united
states and certainly in in
europe we don't have data as good in the u.s from the last couple weeks but we
have some pretty good data
from europe and the uk is that the number of covet deaths when you add it to
the number of non-covered
deaths is not as high as the overall number of deaths you would expect so what
does that tell you
that tells you that some non-covered deaths are probably being classified as
covet deaths these days
so back in march and april there were more people dying than you would have
thought based on the number
of cova deaths now there are fewer people overall dying than you would think
based on the number of
cova deaths and i gotta add one more thing i know this gets complicated but it's
worth it's worth
thinking about we also know that a significant number of people are dying from
lockdown
okay there and and and the number one way you can look at that is overdose okay
overdose deaths
in this country have all you know they've been terrible for years this year it
looks like
they're off the charts so if 20 or 30 000 people and that's probably a
reasonable estimate 20 or 30 000
extra people are dying this year from overdose alone that's that should push up
the number of overall
deaths and yet when you and then if you'd add the cova deaths it should be even
higher when you put
these three things together right now you're getting fewer deaths than you
would expect again what i'm
trying to say is i know that this math can sort of seem complicated and the
stacking can seem complicated
but right now it looks like a significant number of deaths that are being
classified as covid
would have occurred anyway and are just sort of being shifted into the covid
pile and that was not
so true a few months ago so when you see 3 000 people died today of covid until
we get the true mortality
figures for this year for for november and december we're not going to know if
that's really true
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