I have spectacular news to share with you. Amid all the death, doom, and gloom resulting from the coronavirus, we can now celebrate the fact that the virus has cured all other forms of death. Nobody dies from other causes of death anymore. At least that is what we are seeing in some states that are so eager to use the virus as a pretext to crush our liberties.
This week, Colorado recorded Montezuma County as having suffered its third coronavirus death. The implication of being tagged with more deaths for many Democrat-controlled states is that even small rural counties like Montezuma will not be allowed to resume regular life because they will fail to meet arbitrary and impossible benchmarks established unilaterally by the Governor Kings. The problem in this case is that the county coroner is disputing the cause of the death. This now appears to be a widespread problem.
“COVID was not listed on the death certificate as the cause of death. I disagree with the state for listing it as a COVID death, and will be discussing it with them this week,” said County Coroner George Deavers on Tuesday.
It turns out that even though the decedent tested positive for the virus, he died of alcohol poisoning because toxicology showed his blood-alcohol level was 0.55, way past the lethal level of 0.3.
“The person who died did not die from COVID-19, but they did test positive for the virus,” said county public information officer Vicki Shaffer. “The state is reporting that death as a COVID death, but our health department wanted to let people know that even though the person did have the virus, they did not die from it.”
According to local news, the decedent, Sebastian Yellow, 35, was found dead in a park in Cortez on May 4. Think about that for a moment: a 35-year-old just drops dead in a park (the virus takes a long time to kill), and yet they test his body for coronavirus and find it to be positive, and now the state rules it a coronavirus death instead of the obvious alcohol poisoning!
This is not the first time the state government has been caught inflating the numbers. On April 30, CBS4 reported that the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment reclassified three deaths in a nursing home as COVID-19, overruling the decision of the attending physician who said they died of other ailments while in hospice care. The state officials blamed it on the CDC guidance forcing them to tag anyone who tests positive as a COVID-19 death, irrespective of the circumstances. Recently, Dr. Deborah Birx has reportedly called into question the policy and how it’s inflating the number of coronavirus deaths.
We are seeing disputes between state health departments and local coroners over how to determine cause of death play out in other states as well.
As we’ve reported, most estimates show the infection fatality rate for people in their 30s is roughly 0.007%. A typical 35-year-old has a 0.17% chance of dying in any given year … of anything. Thus, the normal mortality rate is 24 times higher than that of coronavirus for people that age. Now that the virus is so ubiquitous and so rarely lethal in young people, it makes no sense to assume someone died from it unless the autopsy showed the degradation of the lungs or other similar symptoms. They are literally coding every death in this country of anyone who has the virus (which is likely in the tens of millions) as a COVID-19 death.
Approximately 2.8 million people die every year, which means roughly 470,000 will die over a 2-month period. Given that it’s very likely 5%-10% of the country have the virus, but very few die from it as a percentage of those infected – nearly zero among younger people – how many of those typical deaths are now being coded as COVID? This is particularly concerning when we see states report a few random deaths among younger people. While anomalous death from the coronavirus is certainly possible in younger people, this raises serious questions about the accuracy of any existing recorded deaths for those particularly young.
We saw this play out in April when Ventura County, California, coded the death of a 37-year-old who overdosed on fentanyl as a COVID-19 death. Nearly 70,000 are dying every year from drug overdoses, particularly young adults. How many of these respiratory deaths will easily be coded as the coronavirus so long as they test positive?
There was much commotion when Georgia officials announced that death of a 22-year-old in Columbus, but the local coroner absolutely disputes that assertions. The 22-year-old new mother tragically died four days after giving birth, but Muscogee County Coroner Buddy Bryan believes she died from a complication stemming from the C-section. “The E.M.S. personnel and myself pretty much came to the same conclusion,” Bryan said. “I personally don’t believe she died from the virus.”
We all see how this virus has become more political than anything in our lifetime. When places like Los Angeles, with so few deaths per capita, are preemptively announcing a lockdown for another three months, there is no longer any denying that liberal politicians will use this as a pretext to push generation-changing social transformation and will stop at nothing in the misinformation war to justify their actions. At least 60,000 people die in L.A. in any given year. In a county of 10 million people, there are officially only 1,659 coronavirus deaths (including the likely inflation). Are we really to believe that coding of deaths going forward will not be politicized and easily conflated with typical deaths?
Nowhere is this more of a concern than in nursing homes where we are seeing more than 50% of the recorded deaths and where many of them are being added retroactively. Naturally, roughly 25% of the annual 2.8 million national fatalities occur in senior care facilities and so many have already tested positive for the virus, but didn’t necessarily die from it. But per CDC guidance, it must be counted as a COVID-19 death.
Last week, my colleague Steve Deace received an email from a listener who just lost her father in a nursing home in Ohio. She noted that he had advanced Alzheimer’s and tested positive for COVID-19, along with 75% of the residents. However, 90% were asymptomatic and her father had recovered from the virus. None of the staff believed he died from the virus, but it was listed as the cause of the death on his death certificate. “Covid-19 is listed as cause of death. Absolute lie. Hopefully our firsthand experience can be added to your research,” she wrote.
Indeed, we are the ones who will have to do this research because the media and government won’t do it for us. (For more from the author of “This Is the Most Blatant Example of Inflated COVID-19 Death Stats Yet” please click HERE)
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