Wednesday, August 12, 2020

Pediatric deaths: Covid (American Academy of Pediatrics data) and Influenza (CDC data and estimates, 2018-19)

According to the AAP, 86 American children have died from Covid-19 through July 30, 2020. (UPDATE Aug 16:  186 was a mistake)

 According to the CDC in its latest year reporting on flu deaths, 
"During the 2018–2019 season, 136 deaths in children with laboratory–confirmed influenza virus infection were reported in the United States. However, influenza-associated pediatric deaths are likely under-reported as not all children whose death was related to an influenza virus infection may have been tested for influenza. By combining data on hospitalization rates, influenza testing practices, and the frequency of death in and out of the hospital from death certificates, we estimate that there were approximately 480  deaths associated with influenza in children during 2018–2019."

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1 comment:

  1. John F. McGowan, Ph.D.August 19, 2020 at 5:24 PM

    The CDC web site and documents contain numerous contradictory numbers and claims regarding pneumonia and influenza. Many of these have been reported and criticized by Peter Doshi, currently at University of Maryland, for years. Doshi's Ph.D. dissertation at MIT is a detailed critique of the numbers and claims as of 2011. He strongly questions their estimates and models that appear to attribute most pneumonia and influenza deaths in the leading causes of death reports to the influenza viruses; laboratory confirmed influenza appears to be rare. The deaths may be due to a wide range of bacterial, viral, and other causes -- for which there is no vaccine to sell.

    Remarkably, the data files on the CDC FluView web site attributed about 188,000 (2017) deaths to pneumonia and influenza each year, while the leading causes of death report (2017) attributes about 55,000 deaths to pneumonia and influenza, a difference of OVER a factor of THREE (3) in two different documents. It is possible that they combine the pneumonia and influenza deaths from the leading causes of death report with "chronic respiratory disease" deaths to get the roughly 188,000 deaths per year attributed to pneumonia and influenza in the FluView data files. This larger number in the FluView data files is comparable to the number of deaths currently attributed to COVID-19.

    See: http://wordpress.jmcgowan.com/wp/uncounted-covid-deaths-the-cdcs-contradictory-pneumonia-and-influenza-death-numbers/

    The most recent raw data appears to still be accessible on the FluView Pneumonia and Influenza Mortality web page:

    https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/index.htm (see Pneumonia and Influenza Mortality Section)

    https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/weeklyarchives2019-2020/data/NCHSData32.csv

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