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There is no doubt that Covid death counts have been grossly exaggerated not just here but the world over. One particular example is in Massachusetts. The Blaze explains.
The Massachusetts Department of Health announced this week that it would be tweaking its health tracking methodology after the approach led to a “significant overcount” in COVID-19 deaths in the state.
[…]The overcount was reportedly the result of a faulty criterion for inclusions that logged deaths as resulting from COVID-19 if the individual had a confirmed positive test within a certain timeframe prior to their passing.
The State House News Service reported that under the old methodology, Massachusetts deemed a fatality COVID-related if it met at least one of three criteria:
1. A case investigation determined the virus “caused” or “contributed” to the death;
2. The death certificate listed COVID-19 or an “equivalent term” as the cause; or
3. The deceased individual had a COVID-19 diagnosis within 60 days of death.
In accordance with guidance from the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the department decided to cut that timeframe in half. Moving forward, the state will log a COVID-19 death insofar as the individual had a confirmed positive test within 30 days of their passing.
The only criterion that should be used is the second one.
[…]Critics will note that the state’s new methodology — though an improvement — will likely still produce inflated results since, remarkably, it continues to log deaths as COVID-19 deaths so long as the deceased merely presented with an infection before they passed away, regardless of whether the virus could be determined as an actual cause of death.
Notwithstanding, state epidemiologist Dr. Catherine Brown said the update will “make sure that what we are capturing is the acute impact of COVID.”
In other words we’re going to log a death as a “Covid death” if we can say it’s likely that the deceased would have lived if he hadn’t had caught Covid even if he actually didn’t die of Covid or even if he didn’t have Covid at the time of death.
I don’t know about you but when I read “Covid death” I take it to mean the person died of Covid.
Here at least we haven’t yet reached the stage where deaths are being logged as Covid deaths even where the deceased didn’t have Covid at the time of death. But if you listen to the media they always say a number of people have died with Covid. Given that Omicron is more contagious but far less deadly than previous variants you can reasonably expect the number of so-called Covid deaths to keep rising simply because more people will get Covid, increasing the chances of people dying “with” Covid.
Again, I don’t know about you, but the media choosing to use “with” instead of “of ” makes me think it’s just all about manipulating the fear factor.
