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Has the death count from Covid-19 been exaggerated? A new announcement from medical bureaucrats in the US only deepens well-founded suspicions. This US announcement joins the recent quiet — while we’re all distracted by the Ukraine war — announcement by Ashley Bloomfield that New Zealand is also reviewing its covid death count.
Those of us who refused to be brow-beaten by the hysterical narrative of the mainstream and regarded with deep scepticism the proclamations of our “sole sources of truth” in government have long suspected that covid deaths were being exaggerated. The only real question was, by how much?
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.
In a press release Thursday, the department acknowledged it would be retroactively removing 4,081 deaths from the state’s overall count while adding 400 deaths, making the net change a decrease of roughly 3,700.
This is not an insignificant amount. It’s roughly 20% of Massachusetts’ total. This is not quite as spectacular as New Zealand’s slashed count, of course.
But even the new figure may be an exaggeration. Even the new criteria seem overly-broad.
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.
The Blaze
All that’s changed is that the timeframe has been relatively narrowed from an astonishing 60 days to a slightly-less wide-ranging 30 days.
Other jurisdictions are also drastically revising their “covid deaths” count.
Last year, Alameda County in California revised its death count down by 25%. Ontario, Canada, has also removed hundreds of deaths from its previous tally, after revising its methodology.
Ontario is changing the way it reports COVID-19 deaths, saying it will provide a more accurate distinction between deaths due to COVID and all deaths in people with COVID.
The province will now start breaking down deaths into three categories. One will include deaths for which COVID-19 is the underlying cause, the second where COVID-19 contributed to but was not the underlying cause, and the third is those when the type of death is unknown or missing.
Toronto Star
But, while some health authorities are revising down their death counts, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is still keeping the goalposts as wide open as possible. In the case of nursing home deaths (one of the biggest sources for covid deaths in the US):
The definition goes further to explain that deaths should be counted if the resident has a positive COVID-19 viral test, had signs or symptoms of COVID-19, were on transmission-based precautions or who died from ongoing complications related to a previous COVID-19 infection […]
CDC guidance set the benchmark for a COVID-19 infection at 90 days. If a resident had a COVID-19 infection, continued to show symptoms for weeks and then died from COVID-19 complications, they could be counted in NHSN data.
USA Today
At the same time, the CDC is admitting that deaths from Covid alone are vanishingly small: just 6% of all “covid deaths”.
Of course, “fact checkers” are furiously denying that that means that only 6% of covid deaths are “real covid deaths”. But, when bureaucrats are so assiduously muddying the waters, especially using weasel-words like “with covid” and “covid-related”, such suspicions are only natural.
When they wait until a foreign war is grabbing headlines to quietly change their figures, there’s even more reason for suspicion.
