Covid exaggeration

December 30. 2020. Death by bad data, bad tests, hospital billing incentives and biased medical director's decision.

For months I have told my Appleton peers and friends that when all is said and done, the number of deaths in America in 2020 will not be much different than they were in 2019, 2018, or earlier. And that is in a time where the number of deaths in the US has been climbing by about 50,000 additional deaths each year over the past ten years, primarily due to the large number of baby boomers born between 1946 and 1955, people who turned 65 ten years ago, when the death trend increased.

I also have questioned the data, especially on the assignment of Covid as THE cause of death, the false positives due to excessive application in the PCR tests for Covid, and the failure to differentiate between a positive Covid test and a 'case' of Covid, the latter of which requires symptoms, not just an unreliable, overly sensitive test.

I have also voiced doubts about the effectiveness of masks and lockdowns, looking at the data -- following the science -- rather than listening to so-called experts.

The complete lack of mortality context has also been troubling, with little or no useful information about deaths from other causes, be it a decline in flue deaths or an increase in murders. We even hear reports from medical examiners, the latest one reported that a person dying of three gunshot wounds was assigned Covid as the cause of death.

Then there are the reports of people who signed up, waited for hours and then left before taking a Covid test, who later received test results for a test they never took.

Or when the state of Wisconsin months ago acknowledged a failure to post 19,000 negative test results. Or the Johns Hopkins analysis of Wisconsin data months ago that showed that 100% of 'Covid' deaths were accompanied by a life threatening co-morbidity, usually a pre-exisiting co-morbidity, like diabetes, ling disease, high blood pressure. Covid did not cause diabetes, bit listening to an Oshkosh doctor telling a journalist that 'of course, Covid causes co-mobodities,' casually dismissing the pre-exisiting ones found to be much more prevalent.

One piece of good news today is a report I saw about an 'audit' of death certificates in Minnesoata, that suggested that Covid deaths may have been over-reported by as much as forty percent in that state.

As my sister-in-law sighed and said, in the end, this may turn out to be primarily a billing fiasco, where the financial (and political) incentives to doctors, hospitals, mayors and governors have created an absurd bias towards over-reporting and mis-assigning Covid deaths.

When all the data are collected, the real scientists review it, and the history of this year is written, I expect there to be a lot of walking back of claims, reversals of findings, and dismissal of the apparent wisdom of those so-called experts.