A John Hopkins University academic found out that COVID-19 did not actually increase the number of death rates across the United States based on the data gathered from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Dr. Genevieve Briand, the assistant program director of the Applied Economics master's degree program at Johns Hopkins University (JHU), gave a lecture where she revealed that based on recorded data, the impact of COVID-19 on the US death rate for 2020 seems to have been over-exaggerated, Just The News reported.
Briand's findings were compiled in a published JHU article that has since been deleted. JHU removed the article several days after it was published, saying it is "used to support" misinformation. LifeSite indicated that more than anything, however, the removal simply seems like an act of censorship.
By looking into the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's records from 2014 to 2020, Briand found out that COVID-19 was consistent with both seasonal and historical trends as there were only 11,292 more deaths in 2020 than in 2018. Although it reflected an increase, it is not as big as how people were made to believe.
Briand explained that since the novel coronavirus impacted the people in the older age group as reports claimed, they focused on the data gathered about the elderly death rate in the US.
Based on the information gathered from the CDC, they found out that when compared to the previous years, the 2020 mortality rate in the US remained the same for the elderly, contrary to their expectations that the epidemic created a spike in the figures.
"The reason we have a higher number of reported COVID-19 deaths among older individuals than younger individuals is simply that every day in the U.S. older individuals die in higher numbers than younger individuals," Briand clarified.
Briand added that based on the historical trend of US mortality rates, 50,000 to 70,000 deaths per week is normal. Therefore the recorded 60,000 average deaths per week from March to September this year does not indicate a difference in the average death rate in the country.
She also she found something unusual with the seasonal increase or the pattern of records that repeats every 12 months with the deaths caused by heart disease, respiratory disease, influenza, and pneumonia, the top leading fatal illness for older people.
One example is the unusual drop in the number of deaths caused by heart disease. In the 2020 CDC figures, it turned out that COVID-19 surprisingly recorded more fatalities than the consistent leading cause of death.
What surprised Briand and the team is that compared to the number of recorded cases during the same season in 2018, "instead of the expected drastic increase across all causes, there was a significant decrease in deaths due to heart disease. Even more surprising...this sudden decline in deaths is observed for all other causes."
"If [the COVID-19 death toll] was not misleading at all, what we should have observed is an increased number of heart attacks and increased COVID-19 numbers," Brian explained. "But a decreased number of heart attacks and all the other death causes doesn't give us a choice but to point to some misclassification," Briand added.
The JHU article indicated that the "trend is completely contrary to the pattern observed in all previous years." Furthermore, "the total decrease in deaths by other causes almost exactly equals the increase in deaths by COVID-19"
"All of this points to no evidence that COVID-19 created any excess deaths. Total death numbers are not above normal death numbers. We found no evidence to the contrary," Briand concluded.
