A closer look at the past month of COVID-19 deaths from the Milwaukee County Medical Examiner's Office reveals that the virus is killing only elderly people and/or people with serious underlying health conditions.
The Milwaukee County Medical Examiner's Office is one of the only in Wisconsin (and perhaps the only) that maintains a comprehensive, publicly available list of the county's deaths and "The Dan O'Donnell Show" used it to create a composite of the "average" COVID-19 death during Wisconsin's current October surge in cases. The average person who died with COVID-19 in October is 75.9 years old with 2.39 comorbidities listed as a contributing cause of death.
From October 1st through 12:00 pm October 28th, the Medical Examiner's Office identified 51 deaths for which "Complications of infection with novel Coronavirus (COVID-19)" is listed either as "Cause A" or "Cause B." All but two of the 51 people who died with COVID-19 in the past month had serious underlying health conditions that ranged from heart failure to cancer to rejection of organ transplants. One patient did not have a cause of death listed but was included in the Medical Examiner's Office list of those who died with COVID-19.
36 of the 51 people (70.5%) who died were over the age of 70. 22 of the 51 (43.1%) were over the age of 80. Eight of the 51 (15.6%) were over the age of 90. Just seven of the 51 (13.7%) were under the age of 60. The average age of the 51 people who died with COVID-19 during the current October surge in cases in Wisconsin was 75.9.
No one under the age of 40 has died in the past month, and the only two people under the age of 50 included a 41 year-old woman who had hypertension and diabetes and whose body rejected both kidney and pancreas transplants.
40 of the 51 victims (78.4%) had some form of heart disease--which includes such serious ailments as hypertensive and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, cardiomyopathy, atrial fibrillation, and hypertension. 10 of the 51 (19.6%) had chronic congestive heart failure. 17 of the 51 (33.3%) had diabetes. 11 of the 51 victims (21.5%) suffered from renal failure. Four of the 51 (13.7%) had cancer. Four of the 51 (7.8%) had Alzheimer's Disease or dementia.
48 of the 51 people who died with COVID-19 over the past month (94.1%) had at least one co-morbidity listed as either the "A" or "B" cause of death. One of those was a 72 year-old woman who died at 11:30 am on October 28th, indicating that underlying conditions might not have been known when this article was published.
The conclusion is inescapable: During the current surge in COVID-19 in Wisconsin, the virus is--in Milwaukee County, at least--almost exclusively killing the elderly and the very sick.