Maldonado Explains Why 6% Tweet is Misleading

A lot has been discussed about a tweet a few days ago that stated “This week the CDC quietly updated the COVID number to admit that only 6% of all the 153,504 deaths recorded actually died from COVID.”

That tweet was removed—in this case, appropriately—because it was a false statement. In order to clarify this topic, let’s start with this knowledge: any person who dies from an acute illness will have comorbidities listed as contributing conditions on their death certificate. For example, if someone dies from a stroke, the death certificate will list other comorbidities, which will likely be hypertension, diabetes, chronic kidney disease, etc.

However, the acute illness that caused the death was still the stroke.

Any other acute illness that leads to death (myocardial infarction, bacterial pneumonia, sepsis, etc.) will frequently have other contributing factors, but undoubtedly it was the acute illness that took the patient’s life.

The CDC report described that 94 percent of COVID-19 deaths had other diagnoses as contributing conditions. Here are the top 8 underlying medical conditions linked with COVID-19 deaths on the report:

1. Influenza and pneumonia


2. Respiratory failure


3. Hypertensive disease


4. Diabetes


5. Vascular and unspecified dementia


6. Cardiac Arrest


7. Heart failure


8. Renal failure

Let’s begin with influenza and pneumonia. All patients with COVID-19 who are sick enough to die will likely have viral pneumonia from COVID-19, and some will have concomitant (naturally accompanying) influenza infection. Obviously though, for the great majority with concomitant infection, COVID-19 would be more dangerous than the flu.

Five of the eight underlying medical conditions are common comorbidities. They are: hypertensive disease (high blood pressure), dementia (mainly in the elderly population), diabetes, heart failure, and renal failure. Many Americans have these chronic medical problems and are at high risk of dying if they become infected with COVID-19.

The other two—respiratory failure and cardiac arrest—are the final complications of anyone who die from COVID-19. No surprise is documented on these deaths; they are obviously related to the actual COVID-19 infection.

This report only confirms what we have known for months—COVID-19 is especially dangerous, and many times fatal, for people with comorbidities (hypertension, renal failure diabetes and dementia) through a pneumonia (infection of the lungs due to COVID sometimes worsened by flu) and the step in this process right before death is usually cardiac arrest and/or respiratory failure.

The deleted tweet was false, mis-informative, and only creates confusion and ends up dividing our country further during a pandemic. Not good.

Meanwhile, COVID-19 continues its deadly path of killing Americans with comorbidities. About 5.8 million Americans have heart failure; more than 30 million Americans have diabetes; 103 million Americans have hypertension; 37 million Americans have chronic kidney disease; and 5 million Americans have dementia.

I heard someone on mainstream media comparing COVID-19 with the Spanish Flu from 1918. In that pandemic, most deaths were secondary to a bacterial pneumonia instead of a direct effect from the virus. However, the truth is that if the patient did not get Spanish Flu, they would not have developed bacterial pneumonia as a complication, and subsequently died. Therefore, measures to control the spread of Spanish Flu still saved many lives by preventing the complications. Likewise, the measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 will save many people, especially those with comorbidities, from dying from the complications of COVID-19.