The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is essentially setting policy across the country, endlessly putting out a stream of so-called facts (that they then revise or rescind).
Their latest update on COVID-19, posted on Tuesday, is a real doozy. Here’s what the CDC said in a section headlined: What do your results mean?
“A positive test result shows you may have antibodies from an infection with the virus that causes COVID-19. However, there is a chance a positive result means that you have antibodies from an infection with a virus from the same family of viruses (called coronaviruses), such as the one that causes the common cold.”
That’s right, because COVID-19 is a coronavirus (like the common cold), your positive test means you have COVID-19 (or the common cold).
Coronaviruses (CoV) — called that because they have spikes around a central ball that looks like the sun — are part of a large family of viruses that cause illness ranging from a cold to more severe diseases, including COVID-19 (caused by SARS-CoV-2), and others such as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS-CoV) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS-CoV).
SARS -CoV-2 is also known as a novel coronavirus (nCoV) because it is a new strain that has not been previously identified in humans.
Many of the symptoms from coronaviruses are similar: upper respiratory infection, fever, coughing, sneezing. While MERS and SARS can be serious — and SARS-CoV-2 as well, at least for the elderly and others with co-morbidities — most are treatable and nearly all people afflicted recover.
So why would the CDC equate COVID-19 with the common cold?
J.B. Neiman, a managing partner and general counsel of a Texas-based health care company that owns 13 free-standing clinics, has an idea. He told former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson, who has been on the forefront of covering the facts behind COVID-19, that the bottom line is money.
Neiman told Berenson he has “heard several stories of how discharge planners are being pressured to put Covid as primary diagnosis — as that pays significantly better. Hospitals want to avoid the discussion but if they don’t they risk another shutdown. This may be an explanation for why there is a gap in hospital executives saying they have plenty of capacity and the increasing number of Covid hospitalizations. You open up your hospitals for normal medical care and you test everyone of those patients — the result is higher percentage of patients who have Covid — now.”
The mainstream media is breathlessly reporting a spike in new infections (even though we’re all wearing masks, so how’d that happen?).
But virtually no one is reporting that deaths from the virus are way down.
On June 27, there were 623 deaths attributed to COVID-19, according to OurWorldInData.com. Two days later, the death toll in the U.S. was 265.
By comparison, 4,928 people died in the U.S. on the peak day, April 16. Deaths have been declining steadily, at least until June 26, when the toll reached 2,437 (the website notes that “some states added probable deaths” on that date). The deaths rose again to 1,270 on Tuesday, but at least one COVID watchdog said there was again a reason for that rise.
“That ‘spike’ yesterday includes more than 600 backdated NYC cases, most from three weeks or more ago. In reality deaths dropped again week over week (about 25%),” Berenson wrote on Twitter.