Americans were dying of Covid months before lockdowns

Early spread would mean some 'early deaths,' which were clearly missed or ignored.

A nurse cares for a Nursing Home patient. Up to 40 percent of Covid victims lived in nursing homes. The vast majority of Covid victims were over the age of 75 at the time of their death. My hypothesis was that early Covid deaths would have been found in this same elderly age cohort.

Note: Divine intervention might have inspired today’s article. I explain why I’m entertaining this possibility in the Reader Comments.

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Americans were almost certainly already dying from Covid in the weeks and months before the first confirmed Covid deaths recorded by the CDC.

This is the main conclusion I reached from an analysis of the mortality statistics in the state of Michigan in the weeks before official Covid among those aged 75 to 84, which is where one would expect to find “Covid deaths.”

Furthermore, CDC mortality charts in this age demo were common across many U.S. states.

The possibility many people may have been dying from “early” Covid could have been investigated by researchers, hospital officials or the press, good-faith investigations which apparently never occurred.

Background

While many statistics can be manipulated, one assumes “All-Cause” deaths  cannot. 

According to conventional wisdom, if Covid was rampant in December 2019 or January 2020, a huge spike in all-cause deaths would have been observed beginning in these same months. 

However, according to national “excess death” statistics, no spike in all-cause deaths in America occurred prior to the third week of March 2020. The conclusion: Covid could not have been spreading in America.

Skeptics of the official narratives (myself included), later developed a theory that would explain this puzzler - i.e. the massive spike in Covid deaths first seen in America in April 2020 must have been been caused by iatrogenic reasons, not a novel virus that wasn’t any more lethal than the seasonal flu. 

Furthermore, the Infection Fatality Rates (IFR) or Case Fatality Rates from this disease are massively lower than were widely publicized. 

The IFR denominator (Covid infections or cases) was almost certainly far higher as “early spread” had likely infected tens of millions of Americans before mid-March 2020.

IMO, the figures comprising the IFR numerator - Covid deaths - are also dubious, primarily because the vast majority of deaths attributed to Covid have been attributed to other causes.

The number comprising the IFR numerator was also assumed to be zero until February 28, 2020, the date of the first “confirmed” Covid death in America. 

In reality, to this day, no one in the public knows when the first Covid death occurred (but this death certainly didn’t happen in February 2020).

While I think I now know the reasons for the massive spike in all-cause deaths after March 2020, I still believe some Americans were dying from Covid before March 2020. The total of these deaths might not be a conspicuous number, but these numbers are probably not trivial either. 

Why I think some unknown number of early Covid deaths did occur …

My theory that some Americans were dying from “early Covid” was first informed by my feature story on a 39-year-old Alabama man who did NOT die from Covid.

Tim McCain contracted Covid in late December 2019 and was hospitalized in critical condition in a Birmingham ICU for 28 days and, according to his wife, nearly died several times. 

Based on the fact Tim experienced all 11 Covid symptoms, the fact he had every clinical marker of a severe case and the fact he (and his wife) later tested positive for Covid antibodies, I have no doubt Tim McCain had Covid in December 2019 - approximately a month before the first confirmed case in America.

However, due to the grace of God or because post-Covid protocols had yet to be implemented, Tim did not die from Covid. 

My belief that millions of Americans had the same illness (in varying degrees of severity) tells me that some Americans did die from Covid. These deaths were simply attributed to other causes, probably pneumonia, sepsis or organ failure attributed to myriad other causes.

Even The New York Times broached the taboo topic of “early spread” in an April 5, 2020 article that quoted Lina Evans, the coroner of Shelby County, Alabama in my state. (Note: I have exchanged several emails with Ms. Evans and spoken with her on the phone at least two times. She also believes “early spread” definitely happened).

From The New York Times article: 

“… Lina Evans, the coroner, said she was now suspicious of a surge in deaths in her county earlier this year, many of which involved severe pneumonia: “We had a lot of hospice deaths this year, and now it makes me go back and think, wow, did they have Covid? Did that accelerate their death?”

“… When we go back to those deaths that occurred earlier this year, people who were negative for flu, now we’re having the ‘aha!’ moment,” she said. “They should have been tested for the coronavirus. As far as underreporting, I would say, definitely.”

In a news segment on the McCains’ likely early cases broadcast by Birmingham TV station WBRC in early May 2020, Ms. Evans was interviewed again.  This time, she speculated cases from the “last quarter of 2019” might have been Covid.

“We had so many hospice deaths in that last quarter of 2019 and the first quarter of 2020,” she said. “COVID wasn’t mentioned, but we did have a lot of people with respiratory failure. I believe that when the research comes out we are going to see that COVID played a role in multiple deaths that we actually had no idea.”

(Author’s comment: The “research” the Alabama coroner references, which could have proven "early Covid deaths” … never happened.)

The New York Times also quoted the chief of internal medicine at Tulane Medical Center in New Orleans in its April 5, 2020 article:

“When I was working before we had testing, we had a ton of patients with pneumonia,” said Geraldine Ménard, chief of general internal medicine at Tulane Medical Center in New Orleans. “I remember thinking it was weird. I’m sure some of those patients did have it. But no one knew back then.”

Testing my hypothesis …

The above background information explains why - more than two years ago - I began searching for possible evidence that people were dying from Covid months and weeks before the first confirmed Covid death.

To provide evidence to support my hypothesis, I first identified what cohort would would be most likely to die from Covid. 

From my research, I knew that at least 80 percent of all “Covid deaths” happened among the American population aged 65 and older. I also knew that the average or median age of a Covid victim was approximately 81.

I theorized that if there was an increase in all-cause deaths that might be partially explained by “early Covid,” these deaths would be seen in the mortality data of the elderly. 

I zeroed in on mortality statistics in the demo “75 to 84.” I found data sources from Michigan and the nation that listed deaths recorded in the first 12 weeks of the year.  This data showed raw or absolute deaths by week for the same 12 weeks from 2015 through 2020. Per my hypothesis, the first 12 weeks of 2020 would have been the earlier (“missed”) months of Covid.

It took hours of hand-writing data from computer-field spread sheets, but I recorded all deaths every week for five years in this age demo. (The link above shows graphs of these deaths. Type in “Michigan” in the “select a jurisdiction” field to look at the Michigan graph. 2020 data is graphed with the red lines).

I then tallied the numbers and compared the five-year-norm to the 2020 weekly numbers. I also compared the 2020 weekly mortality numbers to the previous year (2019) from the same weeks.

Per my hypothesis, a noticeable increase in deaths would be seen among the elderly if Covid was causing an increase in deaths before April 2020. Which, judge for yourself, is exactly what this Michigan data shows. 

Not all, but many other states show the same trends in the 75 to 84 age cohort and also the 65 to 74 age cohort.

In short, I think Covid deaths began occurring well before late February 2020. 

Perhaps because these deaths were largely confined to the elderly and perhaps because these increases weren’t conspicuously large, these deaths did not show up in the national charts and graphs of all-cause deaths. But, at least among the elderly in Michigan (and many other states), the elderly were dying in noticeably larger numbers in the first 12 weeks of 2020.

Note: Week 1 ended January 4, 2020. Week 12 ended March 21, 2020 - six days after the lockdowns. Michigan’s first confirmed Covid case occurred March 4 and its first “confirmed” Covid deaths didn’t occur until Week 12. 

Per my research, the lag between Covid deaths and infections is approximately 21 to 25 days.

For example, Week 2 deaths (525, the largest number) occurred between January 5-11. If anyone died  from Covid in this tranche of deaths, these decedents would have likely been infected by mid-December 2019, perhaps earlier. If any of this cohort were “Covid deaths,” these victims would have been infected at approximately the same time as the “Wuhan outbreak” in mid to late December 2019.

For my take-aways from this research project and other data I found just as interesting, please read Part 2, here.