I read a couple local articles which led my to check the latest Covid statistics

[captain queeg]

As expected new infections are starting to drop off in many areas while deaths are creeping up. The articles I read about people who died were almost entirely unvaxxed. There was one guy who’d been vaxxed but not boosted. Certainly it was anecdotal but I think that’s really what is happening. Something else I noticed was that all the unvaxxed had a statement that they’d died from pneumonia. Sometimes it said Covid pneumonia but sometimes not. I suspect that Covid deniers focus in on pneumonia to pretend it wasn’t really due to Covid. Back when AIDS was in the news a lot they didn’t usually state people had died from pneumonia which was the usual case but focused on AIDS.

[BigmanPigman]

1. That is what happened when a third cousin died of AIDS.

His obit said it was pneumonia but the rest of the family surmised the truth. Pathetic. We lost all respect for that part of the family.

[Mariana]

2. You see it in social media posts in which

people tell about themselves or family members being admitted to the hospital or after they die. An awful lot of them say something like, "X is/was in the hospital with Covid and pneumonia" as if the two things are unrelated.

[frazzled]

3. This is the best article I've read about the numbers

You need to read it all, but basically it’s explaining how the current data on Omicron is not telling the story in context, and these numbers differ greatly from those from Alpha and Delta. Here are a few snippets:

A coronavirus infection isn’t what it once was. Studies suggest that, compared with Delta, Omicron is a third to half as likely to send someone to the hospital; by some estimates, the chance that an older, vaccinated person will die of covid is now lower than the risk posed by the seasonal flu. And yet the variant is exacting a punishing toll—medical, social, economic.

... Should we be focussed on case counts at all? ... More than a hundred and fifty thousand Americans are currently hospitalized with the coronavirus—a higher number than at any other point in the pandemic. But that figure, too, is not quite what it seems. Many hospitalized covid patients have no respiratory symptoms; they were admitted for other reasons—a heart attack, a broken hip, cancer surgery—and happened to test positive for the virus. There are no nationwide estimates of the proportion of hospitalized patients with “incidental covid,” but in New York State some forty per cent of hospitalized patients with covid are thought to have been admitted for other reasons. The Los Angeles County Department of Health Services reported that incidental infections accounted for roughly two-thirds of covid admissions at its hospitals.

... Clarifying the distinction between a virus that drives illness and one that’s simply along for the ride is more than an academic exercise. If we tally asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic infections as covid hospitalizations, we risk exaggerating the toll of the virus, with all the attendant social and economic ramifications. If we overstate the degree of incidental covid, we risk promoting a misguided sense of security. Currently, the U.S. has no data-collection practices or unified framework for separating one type of hospitalization from another. Complicating all this is the fact that it’s sometimes hard to distinguish a person hospitalized “with covid” from one hospitalized “for covid.” For some patients, a coronavirus infection can aggravate a seemingly unrelated condition—a covid fever tips an elderly woman with a urinary-tract infection into delirium; a bout of diarrhea dehydrates a man admitted with sickle-cell disease. In such cases, covid isn’t an innocent bystander, nor does it start the fire—it adds just enough tinder to push a manageable problem into a crisis.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/24/do-the-omicron-numbers-mean-what-we-think-they-mean?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Magazine_011822&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_medium=email&bxid=5be9e9c73f92a40469ffd78c&cndid=9988906&esrc=&utm_term=TNY_Magazine