Why Did the Government Purposely Overcount Covid Deaths From the Start?
Those who claim to know the exact number who died as a direct result of Covid aren't being honest.
On April 7, 2020, at a daily press briefing, Dr. Deborah Birx of the White House Coronavirus Task Force was asked about confusion over the government’s official, rapidly rising Covid death count. What, exactly, were they including as a Covid fatality?
“So I think in this country we've taken a very liberal approach to mortality,” Birx explained. “The intent is right now, that if someone dies with Covid-19, we are counting that as a Covid-19 death.”
This approach would virtually guarantee an exaggerated number of deaths from Covid.
With Covid racing through the US population, CDC experts had already acknowledged (in the fine print) that most infected people would have minor symptoms or none at all. But the government’s puzzling decision on counting Covid fatalities meant an undetermined number of people who weren’t even sick from the virus would be captured in the official death count, anyway.
It turns out there were people uestioning the government’s chosen death count strategy. And they were able to point to some outrageous cases that demonstrated how flawed it was.
Read on for details.
It’s one thing to take “a very liberal approach” to counting Covid deaths, as Birx put it. But it’s quite another to disregard what the more relevant subsets can reveal: How many of the deaths were directly caused by Covid, how many were unrelated, and how many had Covid as a possible factor but not the main cause.
Without a thorough analysis of this breakdown, it’s impossible to have an accurate grip on the commonalities among Covid victims, to best understand what treatments worked or didn’t, and to know Covid’s true toll.
The Colorado Experience
There were outspoken officials who were appalled by what they saw as the systemic overcounting of Covid deaths.
In 2021, I traveled to Grand County, Colorado to interview the coroner, Brenda Bock. She told me that she first smelled a rat in November of 2020. That’s when she discovered that a murder-suicide of a young couple in her county had been counted as two Covid deaths.
The case was that of Lucais Reilly who shot his wife Kristin in the head, then turned the gun on himself, committing suicide. They pair had alcohol and drugs in their systems and a history of domestic troubles. It’s still unclear who got their tragic deaths added to the state’s count as Covid-caused. Nowhere do their death certificates even mention Covid.
Bock told me she assumed there were unseen reviewers running names of all fatalities through a Covid test database and if they tested positive for Covid within 28 days of death, they were officially recorded as Covid deaths. Even though, in this case, they died of gunshots. But why?
Miscategorizing the deaths of a young couple not only elevated the Covid count in a county that had had no actual Covid deaths at the time, according to Bock, but it also skewed the overall stats, wrongly making it seem as though Covid— a virus almost exclusively fatal only to the elderly and sick— had claimed the lives of two healthy, young adults.
Within a week of the murder-suicide, two more Grand County deaths popped up on the Coloarado’s Covid count. But Bock had no record of those, either. She investigated and found out why.
“Two of them were actually still alive, and yet they were counting them,” she told me. “Had I not called them on it and asked them who those were, where were they from, all the information about it and it's like, ‘Oh, well that was a typo. They just got put in there by accident.’”
Because of the way the feds and states decided to collect the information, it’s impossible to know exactly how big the miscounts were. Bock was in a unique position to challenge what was being called Covid deaths in Grand County because the county was so small. In many cities and counties, the population is too large for coroners to know about discrepancies.
We do know it wasn’t just happening in Grand County. Dr. James Caruso is chief medical examiner and coroner for Denver and he noticed the same thing. I spoke with him, too, during my visit to Colorado.
“I was told by some of my fellow coroners in the more rural counties in Colorado that it was happening to them, that they knew of issues where they had signed out a death certificate with perhaps trauma involved. And they were being advised that it was being counted as a Covid-related death,” he told me.
That included a coroner in Montezuma County, Colorado who documented a death caused by alcohol but— like Grand County’s murder-suicide and the two living people— it, too, got counted as a Covid fatality.
There were also three Colorado nursing home deaths attributed to Covid even though the attending physicians said they weren’t related to Covid! In fact the nursing home reported the residents had been receiving Hospice care unrelated to Covid.
Putting their deaths into the Covid column inflated the nursing home’s Covid death toll at the time by more than 50%. State health officials who overruled the attending physicians said they were following the CDC’s guidelines.
“At some level--maybe the state level, maybe the federal level--there's a possibility that [people] were cross-referencing Covid tests,” theorizes Caruso. “And that people who tested positive for Covid were listed as a Covid-related death, regardless of their true cause of death. And I believe that's very erroneous, and not the way the statistics needed to be accumulated.”
But Fauci Says We Undercounted…
Government adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci claimed there were likely far more Covid deaths than documented; not fewer. On May 12, 2020, Fauci referred to the Covid death count stating, “The number is likely higher. I don’t know exactly what percent higher, but almost certainly it is higher.” He cited no evidence.
Others pointed to the theory that there was undercounting because a lot of people probably died of Covid but had never been tested.
Because the government’s strategy was so imprecise, it’s impossible to know for certain either way.
Whatever the case, Bock and Grand County, Colorado commissioners knew they had witnessed overcounting in their neck of the woods. And they were so concerned about the implications, they fired off a letter to the state.
Merrit Linke, chair of the Grand County Board of Commissioners at the time of my visit, told me, “We drafted and signed a letter, all three commissioners, and the coroner also signed, and sent it to the governor saying, ‘Hey, these numbers are not correct. It's not right. We should report these correctly, and please fix this.’”
Additionally, Bock complained personally to Colorado Governor Jared Polis and spoke to himabout the murder-suicide. “When I did talk to the Governor, he told me he didn't believe it was right,” says Bock. “But he wasn't going to have them remove it from the count because all the other states were doing it that way so we were going to also.”
Denver’s medical examiner Caruso says he also voiced his objections in April 2020 to the Colorado Department of Public Health. “I told them very clearly that someone can die ‘of’ Covid or they can die ‘with’ Covid. And the two are very different.”
A spokesman for Colorado Governor Jared Polis told me the governor agreed with Grand County Coroner Bock and was “outraged” that a murder-suicide was recorded as Covid-related.
Colorado did make an adjustment as a result of the complaints. It still reported the all-inclusive total but also broke it into subcategories to differentiate between those who died “of” Covid and those who died “with” Covid.
“In an effort to be abundantly clear,” the governor’s spokesman added, the Colorado website explains that “some numbers combine deaths that were a direct result of COVID and deaths that occurred when the individual had COVID-19.”
The difference proved to be significant.
The Impact
During my visit to Colorado, which was in summer of 2021, the state’s total Covid-related death tally was 13,845. But separating out the deaths not directly caused by Covid cut that number by about half to 7,028 with the rest dying “among” or “with” Covid — not because of it!
Beyond Colorado, there are other hints as to the extent of the overcounting. Alameda County, California changed its methodology in June of 2021 to remove deaths that weren’t a direct result of Covid. That reduced their Covid death toll by more than 400 people, or 25%.
The CDC’s Death Certificate Analysis
Surely, you might say to yourself more than four years after the start of the pandemic, we’ve sorted out how many people actually died from Covid.
But there is still vagueness in the methodology. For example, the CDC stopped updating its “mortality overview” on September 9, 2023. At that time, there had been 48,615 Covid deaths for the year. But in as many as 31% of those cases, the CDC admitted, Covid wasn’t the “underlying cause” listed on the death certificate. It was a “contributing factor.”
Whether the underlying cause or a contributing factor, there’s room for doubt when it comes to death certificates. Numerous coroners reported being pressured to list Covid even when the deaths were unrelated.
In August 2020, Hal Short’s wife in Nashville, Tennessee, said she was stunned to see Covid-19 named as the cause of death on her husband’s death certificate— after he died of an aggressive cancer. He’d tested negative for coronavirus three times. Observers noted it was as if the hospital where he was being cared for kept testing him as he was dying of cancer hoping he would pick up Covid along the way so it could somehow be blamed for his death.
Only after the family persisted with complaints was Covid removed from Short’s death certificate. A clerical error was blamed. Short’s wife, Dean, said in an interview, “That’s really not good enough…just saying ‘we made a mistake’ and we just forget about it. How many other people are you making this mistake with?”
As of this writing, the CDC lists a total of 1,193,108 Covid deaths. That includes all the people for whom Covid was deemed to be somehow “involved” even if wasn’t the main cause on the death certificate.
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Great article, Sharyl. You have to wonder if we all just got played. Deliberate or not, the fact is they were successful in destroying the American economy. I believe they intended to do that. What they were not counting on was the complete unmasking of the Marxist public education system and the complete destruction of trust in the medical community. Appreciate reading a journalist that reports the story and lets you draw your own conclusions.