Fundamental Flaws in Collecting and Interpreting COVID Data: ‘Covidisation’ of “Regular Deaths” in USA.

Background: The COVID virus was recognized in January 2020 and it started almost immediately the most controversial epidemic of our history there the combination of a somatic disease and the weaknesses of human rationalism literally stopped the World and turned our life upside-down. Objective: Specifying and measuring the major errors in the interpretation and communicating epidemic data, that violated the rules of evidence based medicine and rational respect for the objective reality. Methods: 1) The maximal possible number of “true” COVID deaths were estimated from the frequency of viral test positivity in the tested general population. The difference between the reported and theoretical maximum of COVID deaths were the result of “hearsay” determinations of the UCOD (not supported by laboratory test) i.e. highly questionable. 2) The number of statistically expected “regular deaths” (from the Actuary tables) provided an estimate how many persons died “with” COVID infection but not “due to” of the virus disease. Only the excess deaths could have been the result of the virus contribution, with statistical certainty. All original data in this study were collected from publicly available, official databases and evaluated by using simple well known statistical methods. A “political score” was used to characterize the states on a continuous left (democrat) to right (republican) scale based on the political attitude of the citizens as determined and available from published opinion research. Results: 1) COVID as the Underlying Cause of Death (UCOD) haven’t been verified by specific laboratory viral test in ca. 40.3% of reported causes. These, exclusively HEARSAY information based cases violated the WHO guidelines for reporting COVID related deaths. (Use of U07.1 code); 2) Large number of natural, age related, expected deaths have been reported as COVID related deaths even if the virus reasonably couldn’t play any causative role as UCOD. These PSEUDO COVID deaths were ca 46% of all reported COVID deaths. The oldest persons in this group were 85+ years old and comprised as much as 28% to all allegedly COVID fatalities (the GERONTO COVID deaths). These errors significantly inflated the number of COVID deaths and the related mortality statistic. Conclusions: The number of correctly identified COVID related deaths in our study is about 32% of the officially published number [171K instead of 533K, respectively]. The average FATALITY of COVID stays at ~0.54% and the MORTALITY 53/100K (On May 2021).