Lots of health statistics can be deceiving, especially when comparing countries to countries and even region to region.

It can be intensely frustrating when non-comparable stats are used to make a point, usually a political point.

The most obvious case is comparing infant mortality statistics between countries; the US often looks bad in these comparisons, but that is mostly due to the fact that we actually count the mortality of infants, while other countries bury the data by excluding a lot of deaths from their statistics. A number of countries classify early deaths of infants who were live births as being stillborn, for instance. In the US we count any baby born alive who subsequently dies in our infant mortality statistics.

Another case is COVID stats, where the US ranks pretty poorly, as with infant mortality. Despite years of being told that the US government has been rigorous in properly counting COVID deaths, everybody who has a working brain should have figured out by now that the US has grossly overcounted deaths from the virus.

There are lots of reasons for that–there was an actual financial incentive to do so, with the government paying larger sums to healthcare providers for COVID patients, and paying the death expenses of those who died from COVID.

And, of course, the Establishment wanted everybody panicked and compliant, and no better way to do that than claim every motorcycle accident victim a COVID death.

After relentlessly calling it a "conspiracy theory", New York Times and CDC now admit:

Authorities overcounted COVID deaths and overhyped the pandemic.

About 1/3 of "official" COVID deaths, or hundreds of thousands of deaths, were not due to COVID.https://t.co/MLj6Dx0D0X pic.twitter.com/mghb0Ac3Dm

— Kevin Bass PhD MS (@kevinnbass) July 18, 2023

Time and again cases like this have been declared anomalies, and claims that the government is overcounting COVID deaths have been “debunked.”

But as with their admission that the Hunter Biden laptop was real years after it was proven to be so, the New York Times buried their admission that the numbers were cooked deep in the bowels of a story.

Years after the revelation would have had a political impact, and only as an aside, the Times confirmed what those of us who have been slandered as conspiracy theorists were saying.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

A very large fraction of the people classified as dying from COVID died WITH COVID, not from it. If you factor that in and the numbers change dramatically, and the US would not look so bad in international rankings.

This doesn’t amount to an admission they lied but rather is simply covering their own asses after it no longer matters. They got what they wanted: the panic, the election results they liked, the smearing of Republicans, the wholesale changes in how social media companies regulate speech, and the suppression of dissent from their power grab.

This is in the “now they tell us” category that Anthony Fauci entered just after his retirement when he published an article in Cell basically admitting that vaccines against respiratory diseases don’t really work as advertised.

Thanks for nothing. I wish I could throw you in jail for lying to us for years.

When looking at any set of statistics the very first question should be: are we comparing apples to apples? In many cases, the answer will be absolutely not. This is particularly true in international comparisons or comparisons between dissimilar populations. For instance, 7 million illegal immigrants from impoverished countries have flooded the country. Their rates of disease will be far worse than the general population, but they will now be included in the overall statistics.

Comparing this population to Japan is likely to yield rather distorted numbers. “Look! American health care sucks!”

You can make statistics say anything you like. That doesn’t make them totally useless, but you have to know how to read them. And that is often hard because the nature of the underlying data may be hidden or distorted.

Just remember: everything is politicized, and read it through that lens. If something seems off, it probably is.