This week, there is a lot of errant social media traffic about “secret” stats just revised on the CDC’s website.

Typical of those is this post: “The truth is only 9,210 dead from COVID-19 IN THE US.” And posts from doctors like Dr. Elizabeth Hess (a chiropractor) fuel the rumors that the CDC is trying to bury this information.

Responding to several inquiries I have received about the “CDC deception,” I have noted that, while CV19 disease has been highly politicized by the Democrats, who are fomenting fear to line up more voters by errantly blaming Donald Trump for the disease, the fact is, the CDC data on “comorbidities” is not part of a cover-up to hide the “truth” that CV19 is no more dangerous than the flu.

Some of the inquiries came from medical professionals who have spent enough time dealing with illness and death to know better — which is to say this latest deception assertion is sucking in good people.

According to Kimberly Ross: “The narrative that quickly spun out of this data update was the idea that there are far fewer actual COVID-19 deaths — 94% less, to put a number on it — and that the country is being tricked into believing things are worse than they really are. This interpretation entirely disregards how contributing factors that lead to death have been exacerbated by COVID-19.”

In fact, the “comorbidity” listing is not a secret. Comorbidity is a reference to the “risk factors” the CDC has listed all along — as it has with disease outbreaks in the past. For example, in the lethal 2018/19 flu season, the CDC indicated there were as many as 80,000 deaths, much as today the CDC lists 184,000 deaths from the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus — despite all the extreme mitigation efforts.

But the actual “cause of death” in 2018 was rarely listed as influenza, much as the cause of death now is rarely listed as COVID. The cause of death is generally from a list of comorbidity risk factors that were exacerbated by the flu, or now COVID. The person dying had the virus but cause of death was not listed as the CV19 virus.

To better understand this, thousands of people die in car wrecks each year, but “car wreck” is not listed as the cause of death. Some form of trauma is listed, but the trauma was caused by the car wreck.

As epidemiologist Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz notes correctly, the CDC data about the other 94% of deaths is “very clear that this doesn’t mean [those] deaths aren’t Coronavirus deaths.”

According to Meyerowitz-Katz, “In the U.S., deaths are recorded using standardized death certificates. On these certificates, completed by medical certifiers, there are several spaces to fill in — one for the immediate cause of death, and then several lines for the underlying causes of that. One way of looking at the precise number is to ask how many COVID-19 deaths had coronavirus as the UNDERLYING [emphasis his] cause. The CDC has actually estimated this, and puts it at >95 percent of all COVID-19 deaths, meaning that the vast majority of deaths recorded as caused by Coronavirus in the U.S. were caused by COVID-19.”

The vast majority of CV19 deaths would not have occurred without comorbidity risk factors triggered by the virus. But according to the CDC, there have been 9,210 deaths where no other risk factor or cause of death was noted. As the CDC page in question makes clear: “Table 3 shows the types of health conditions and contributing causes mentioned in conjunction with deaths involving coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). For 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned.”

On the other end of the risk and comorbidity spectrum, the CDC also reports that almost 30% of healthcare workers with CV19 never knew they had it until they were tested. And fortunately, the summer surge is easing.

(Visit our comprehensive CV19 Pandemic response and recovery page to review our timeline of government and political actions related to the pandemic, and see our related pages regarding the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.)