Nearly 67 percent of the coronavirus deaths in Wisconsin involved severe underlying conditions, according to public records obtained by the MacIver Institute.
Data obtained from the Wisconsin Department of Health proves that less than 2 percent of COVID-19 deaths were caused solely by the coronavirus.
As of Dec. 3, 68 of the 3,562 COVID-19 deaths were only from the coronavirus.
Meanwhile, individuals with co-morbidities accounted for 67 percent of the state’s coronavirus deaths.
These numbers confirm the MacIver Institute’s past findings.
In July, the group reported that a 81 percent of COVID-19 deaths in Wisconsin involved another underlying condition.
And in August, MacIver found that 97 percen of the Wisconsinites who died with COVID-19 had an underlying condition.
“Almost everyone dying of it has other serious health problems,” Milwaukee County Medical Examiner’s Office Operations Manager Karen Domagalski admitted earlier this summer.
The most common co-morbidities among COVID-19 victims include hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, leukemia, colon cancer, and prostate cancer.
Several studies prove that the COVID-19 death rate has dropped significantly over the past few months.
One study, of a single healthcare system, found that mortality among hospitalized coronavirus patients dropped by 18 percentage points since the start of the pandemic.
Patients in the study had a 25.6 percent chance of dying from the virus back in March, but as of October they had only a 7.6 percent chance.
“We find that the death rate has gone down substantially,” said Leora Horwitz, a doctor who studies population health at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine and an author on one of the studies.
Bilal Mateen, a data science fellow at the Alan Turing Institute in the United Kingdom, said drops in the death rate are clear across all ages and underlying conditions.
“Clearly, there’s been something [that’s] gone on that’s improved the risk of individuals who go into these settings with COVID-19,” he said.
