Alex Berneson Details How Coronavirus Deaths Are Counted

So that's one issue with the death counting, is that so many of the people, so let's say you're, and I urge people, one of the things that I've done a couple of times on Twitter that always gets an interesting response is you can go look at coroner's reports, especially in Milwaukee, where they put them all online, of people who've died. So you can actually see the people who have died of COVID, and you'll see how sick they are for the most part. I'm talking about people in their 80s and 90s who have multiple severe comorbidities. So in that case, it's really hard to tell. Did this person die with COVID or from COVID? If my heart is failing and my kidneys are failing, and I get this thing and I die the next day, okay, I died, did I die with COVID or did I die two weeks before I would have died anyway, and we're counting that as from COVID. Or maybe even a year before you would have died anyway, but the 2.6 comorbidity factors, that's the average for people that died of COVID. That's correct. You've died with COVID. That's a good way of saying it. Again, it's very, very hard to distinguish with and from in these cases of people who are really sick. Now, sometimes it's not that way. Sometimes you can say, again, a 50-year-old who is relatively healthy gets COVID, they died. They died from COVID. COVID killed them. We can agree about that. But many of the cases are hard to understand, or not hard to understand, but hard to distinguish. And I'll make one more point about deaths. Very, very, very important point. PCR testing. I know you know what this is, but you look for a sample of the virus. Usually it's in the nose. You multiply it, and you run a cycle where it doubles over and over and over again. And when it gets to a certain point, it's actually incredible technology. It's sort of magical. But they add a fluorescent marker to it. And at some point, if you can see the fluorescence, it's considered a positive sample. Okay. Here's the thing. A 40-cycle PCR test means that you are multiplying the original, any original viral material in that sample by one trillion times. Okay, so a single viral particle that you pick up becomes one trillion particles. It is very, very easy to find virus in people when you're running a PCR cycle at that level. Okay, it does not mean necessarily that they're very sick at the time. It doesn't even mean that they have active virus in their bodies at the time. They could have a piece of virus that the original sample is picking up and multiplying by 40X. Okay. It's clear, by the way, when people have a low threshold, let's say 20 times, let's say it only takes 20 cycles that's a million multiplications. If you're positive at 20 cycles, you're pretty sick. If you're positive at 25 cycles, you're probably pretty sick. If you're positive at 30 cycles, maybe not. 40 cycles, it doesn't really mean anything. It means that you have this one bit of virus in you that they've managed to find. Does it mean you're contagious? It probably doesn't mean you're contagious. I don't like that word. I like that word probably. Well, I'm around grandma. I don't like to say never unless I'm sure. Okay. So when I say probably, it usually means never, but I just don't like saying. I understand. Okay. When we count deaths, the states have a procedure. Most states, they look at positive tests and they match them with death certificates. Okay. So let's say you had a positive test, okay, in tomorrow. Okay. And let's say it was 38 cycles. They're not gonna tell you that, but it was 38 cycles. Okay. You are not very sick at all with COVID. Okay. But you're in a registry somewhere. Your name's in a registry. A month and a half later, you die. Let's say you get hit by a car. That will still initially come up as a positive COVID death because you had a positive test and you died within a specific amount of time after having that test. But they don't distinguish from a violent accident? Not initially. Now, some of the states are trying to clear this up, but let's say you died of a heart attack, Joe. Okay. A heart attack is a potential outcome of COVID. You're always gonna be on there if you died of a heart attack. So you're saying that if you have this tiny amount of COVID in your system, you never wind up getting sick, but yet you have a heart attack a couple of weeks later, three, four weeks later, they will still call that a COVID death, even though you never got sick from COVID. 100%. That doesn't seem smart. The idea is to capture deaths as broadly as possible. The idea is this is a serious illness and we wanna know every possible person who's died from it. We don't do this with any other illness. Is it because they don't have the resources to differentiate between the people that have died from heart attacks where it's clear? Well, we looked at the person, they had a very small amount of the virus in their system. Four weeks later, there's no way they were sick from that. But is that- It's a function of decisions that have been made along the way. So they could have set the PCR threshold at lower. They could have set it at 30. They were aware from almost the beginning of this issue that you can find a comment from Fauci in July talking about this, okay? But, and certainly they knew well before this. The idea was we wanna know sort of as broadly as possible how many people have this. And then secondarily, we wanna define deaths from COVID as broadly as possible. And what is the level set up currently? Different states have different levels, but in most places it's 37 to 40 cycles. Which again, means that a lot of those people at the high end are not sick. And they certainly had COVID at some point, but they probably don't have it anymore. Here's the other reason to do this show. If you set it really high, you're gonna capture people on the way in just as they're getting sick. So if you're truly afraid of, we wanna quarantine everybody really early, then you have to set the threshold really high. So that, to the extent there's a logic behind it, that's the logic behind it. But it has all these negative side effects. So there was one other point I wanted to make, but I'll remember it in a second. So the negative side effects would be that they're inflating the number of people that not just have it, but die from it because of the fact that they're making sure that these deaths that get linked within a certain time period. What is the time period? So in some states it's 30 days, in some states it's 60 days. I don't know if it's more than 60 anywhere, but the states are sort of allowed to define it. Oh, here's, okay, so there's a negative for the person who's tested positive because you then have to isolate yourself. You can't work, you're scared. And then there's this negative for society with the death counts later. Right, but isn't that negative that you have to isolate yourself and you can't work? That seems very rational. Because if you do test, like let's say you're on the way in, you catch it, you have a little tiny bit of it in your system and they're like, you have to isolate, you have COVID. What if that person just went out and started drinking, got run down, the COVID multiplies, and then they have a full blown case and then they start spreading. So that is, look, realistically, can that happen sometimes? Yes. That seems like that would happen a lot. Well, it doesn't happen that much because at 37 you're asymptomatic, so you're not gonna know unless you have some reason to be tested. But isn't there a significant amount of spread from asymptomatic people? So this is another argument that we don't, there's asymptomatic spread, it looks to be very rare, although now Fauci's saying it's not so rare. There's pre-symptomatic spread. Pre-symptomatic spread appears to be more real. We need another person other than Fauci. That's the one guy. We do. Like everyone says Fauci says, like we have this guy. Yes. Let me say one more thing about death count, okay? Okay, back in March and April, people said COVID deaths are being under-counted. We're not doing enough testing. There's all these people dying. They're being called pneumonia deaths. It's probably COVID. That was probably true at the time, especially in New York and New Jersey. You can look and you can see the number of what are called excess deaths, more people dying than you would expect in a normal year, was higher than the number of COVID deaths, okay? And a lot of those deaths were in people who had pneumonia. Okay, so that looks like, hey, we didn't even, this is even worse than we thought. We're not even capturing everybody who died. Okay, but that was March and April. Let's talk about what's happening now. We know the PCR tests are gonna capture a lot of people who aren't sick anymore and who maybe never were sick. We know that some of those people are gonna be classified as COVID deaths. If they, again, I'm 88. I somehow was asymptomatic a month ago, but I got a positive PCR test. Now I die because I'm 88. That's a COVID death, okay? What we're seeing now in the United States and certainly in Europe, we don't have data as good in the US from the last couple weeks, but we have some pretty good data from Europe and the UK, is that the number of COVID deaths, when you add it to the number of non-COVID deaths, is not as high as the overall number of deaths you would expect. So what does that tell you? That tells you that some non-COVID deaths are probably being classified as COVID deaths these days. So back in March and April, there were more people dying than you would have thought based on the number of COVID deaths. Now there are fewer people overall dying than you would think based on the number of COVID deaths. And I gotta add one more thing. I know this gets complicated, but it's worth thinking about. We also know that a significant number of people are dying from lockdown. Okay, and the number one way you can look at that is overdose, okay? Overdose deaths in this country have all, they've been terrible for years. This year it looks like they're off the charts. So if 20 or 30,000 people, and that's probably a reasonable estimate, 20 or 30,000 extra people are dying this year from overdose alone, that should push up the number of overall deaths. And yet, and then if you'd add the COVID deaths, it should be even higher. When you put these three things together, right now you're getting fewer deaths than you would expect. Again, what I'm trying to say is, I know this math can sort of seem complicated and the stacking can seem complicated, but right now it looks like a significant number of deaths that are being classified as COVID would have occurred anyway, and are just sort of being shifted into the COVID pile. And that was not so true a few months ago. So when you see 3,000 people die today of COVID, until we get the true mortality figures for this year, for November and December, we're not gonna know if that's really true. Catch new episodes of the Joe Rogan Experience for free, only on Spotify. Watch back catalog JRE videos on Spotify, including clips, easily, seamlessly switch between video and audio experience. On Spotify, you can listen to the JRE in the background while using other apps, and can download episodes to save on data costs, all for free. Spotify is absolutely free. You don't have to have a premium account to watch new JRE episodes. 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