Posing as a “trusted health authority” comedian JP Sear’s said in a recent skit: “We just published research on the CDC website that shows only 6% of COVID deaths that we’ve been reporting to you were caused by COVID alone. 94% of COVID deaths had an average of 2.6 co-morbidities. That means of the 161,392 COVID deaths that we’ve been shoving in your face only 9,210 were legitimate COVID deaths.”

While I’d be the last to defend the CDC, I disagree with JP in his comical calculations.

If we look at table 3 in the CDC report we see that of 154,000 COVID deaths listed, there are 158,000 cases of respiratory co-morbidities. Respiratory problems would be expected with COVID-19, being that its definition could be summarized as a severe respiratory distress caused by SAR-COV-2. Of course, it does seem redundant and suspicious to list respiratory illnesses as a co-morbidity of a respiratory disease. Sort of like double-dipping.

We also need to consider, as I’ve written about before, that the only way to die of COVID-19 is to die from pneumonia. Indeed, as stated in Cellular & Molecular Immunology, Chinese scientists had named the disease “novel coronavirus-infected pneumonia (NCIP)” before it was called COVID-19. Therefore, is one to assume from the CDC’s data that all 154,000 cases died of pneumonia?

It’s also interesting to see how 64,000 had “influenza and pneumonia.” Why didn’t they just say “influenza?” Should not all of the deaths have been from pneumonia? Or did they have two pneumonias at the same time? Or are these 64,000 deaths the only ones who died of pneumonia?

In the end, the data isn’t labelled and organized clearly. What we really need is a very clear count of how many of these SARS-COV-2 patients died of pneumonia.

Now, back to JP’s 6% with no co-morbidities: Did they not have pneumonia or did they? If not, then what did they die from? These would be perfectly healthy people who then somehow died for no known reason? This seems very suspect and reminds me of reports of minorities in New York who found themselves on a ventilator with eight IV drugs because they were having an anxiety attack. In such cases it seems the treatment killed them.

The data does show, however, that having cancer, diabetes, kidney failure, high blood pressure and heart problems puts people at risk of dying. If SAR-COV-2 is in their blood stream at the time of death that seems rather incidental, since the virus usually does not result in death (for more than 99% of cases).

And it would be no surprise that Americans have such a higher death count, since they are leaders in renal failure, diabetes and obesity. While a small percentage of these diseases may be caused from injuries, genes or poorly aligned stars, the vast majority are related to diet, lifestyle and lack of sleep. Which begs the question: Why are we focusing on masks, sanitizers and social distancing?

So I respectfully disagree with JP Sears and others saying that the CDC report shows only 6% died form COVID-19. All this report seems to do is confirm the lack of clear and accurate reporting of COVID-19 deaths. The actual mortality numbers remain a mystery.