Follow science! That is the buzzword for 2020. There is no shortage of opinions out in the world. Everyone has an opinion for covid. The purpose of this writing is not new facts. It is to point out what science is. Am I a Doctor? No. I am not sure of what I am. By education, a chemical engineer. My current profession is a chemistry professor. In between I was a poison gas / explosive expert. Suffice to say, my life is built upon science. I am dismayed on what the world is calling science now. A sentence about language, the English word science comes from the word scienti in Latin, and episti in Greek, like the word epistle? The word means knowledge. As in “fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge” (or science). Science truly got its start as trying to find out how God operates. Why things happen. AND YOU BETTER KNOW THE BOUNDARIES. (FEAR)
This edition of my writing got its final push from a local headline. Erie County reports 75 deaths by covid in November.1 This was headline news. Yes, a horrible thing, but how headline worthy? A previous article pointing out the horrors of this stated that the average age of those dying from covid has dropped to younger people, down to 77 years old. I looked up life expectancy data. The next logical step. A baby born in 2020 is expected to live 79 years. Wait, life expectancy is calculated at birth. Go back to 1950, 70 years ago, what was the average life expectancy? Well the CDC said it was 68 years 2 The people are dying from covid, but they are still ‘beating the curve’.
My next points of data are causes of death in my county. The top 5 causes of death in my county is consistent with the top 5 causes statewide, and nationally. It has been this way for a multitude of years.3
The county’s population has been stagnant for many years, and each category has stayed about the same. We all have read stories that heart attacks increase during the holidays, along with unintentional injuries (drug deaths, automobile accidents, hunting accidents) for simplicity when I quote a monthly number off the chart above, it simply is divided by 12. We will see if 75 deaths per month is outrageous, cause for concern, or other.
Cause of death | monthly death |
heart disease | 184 |
cancer | 176 |
CLRD | 42 |
unintentional | 41 |
stroke | 26 |
Covid has less than half the numbers of heart disease or cancer. I surmise, I will guess, most of the heart disease deaths were in people over 50. Perhaps around the average age of 77. Then what exactly is CLRD? It stands for chronic lower respiratory disease. This is not lung cancer, that falls under cancer. It is not pneumonia, nor influenza. Those two scourges are #6 in my county. CLRD is a catch all for emphysema, asthma, bronchitis et al. coincidently adding number 4, and 6 is right where Covid November numbers fall. Local, state and federal death statistics lag years behind in publishing. 2017 statistics was long before Covid was even a blip. In 2023, will these other causes lower to make Covid appear worse? I can not answer that. For that would be speculation, not science. I am not the news editor; I do not pick the headlines. I will tell you that November 2017 did not have a headline saying CLRD took the lives of 42 people. There were not 5 front page stories about a new disease killing people who lived 10 years longer than expected. 2017, was just 2017. People died, sad, but not worthy of 20 hours of a 24-hour news cycle. My final Covid statement is why isn’t this a headline? I ended my data below on November 15th to allow the disease to run its course. There actually is data on average length of time till death, and so on.5 And good science involves standard deviations, means, and more. Death rate is calculated by death by covid, divide by covid cases times 100. It appears 3 time fewer people are dying. The disease is not as bad, or doctors are getting better at treating a disease that is only supportive care for treatment. Why isn’t this news?
death rate% | ||
Dec 1-July 1 | July 1 – Nov 15 | |
USA | 4.5 | 1.8 |
NY state | 7.7 | 1.0 |
I deal in science, and facts. There are too many sources out there about vaccines to vet them all. I will not make a statement about the new vaccine. I will give a history lesson about Yellow Fever though. The average individual most likely knows it is a tropical disease transmitted by mosquito, and not much else. As a little tease, I will say that it is an RNA virus, and there has been a global shortage of the vaccine for about 3 years now. First the history lesson. It is not just tropical. 1793 Philadelphia was capital city of the infant USA. The fall in the northeast can feel tropical, standing water causes mosquitoes to breed. The disease broke out. 9% of the city died. The disease itself kills 30% of those afflicted. President Washington fled the capital, and planning started for Washington DC as the new capital, a non-port city where African slave ships do not dock and unload a cargo of infected mosquitoes. Though how transmission took place was unknown.
Next New Orleans, in the nearly 100 years from 1817 to 1905, more than 41,000 people died 4 from several outbreaks. Some affected the entire Mississippi river valley. You may have heard that It stopped the French from building a canal in Panama, the task was finished by Roosevelt by draining the swamps. I write all this to say, several tropical countries require vaccination against yellow fever before entering. (Vaccination for travel? Unheard of, and it is transmitted by mosquitoes, they are the ones needing the vaccine, not people?). several million vaccines are given in Africa yearly. In 2017, a fire caused a single factory to produce the majority of the worlds supply. There has been a shortage ever since. At the same time the WHO said a shot previous to 2015 may not confer lifelong immunity, you need a booster from that single factory. In the last 3 years, Bill and Melinda kindly stepped up offering money to speed the production. I have not found anything nefarious, but my beloved USA would never experiment with RNA virus production on a third world country. Keep an eye out for this as a future developing story, it may be setting the stage for the future.
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