Minnesota state Representative Mary Franson and Senator Scott Jensen (who is a physician) collected 2800 death certificates provided by the Minnesota Department of Health, checking to see if alleged Wuhan virus deaths were being over-counted. (Well, anyone who sees the obituaries of 95-year-olds and 103-year-olds who are called pandemic victims knows they are being over-counted. Ethics Alarms has noted this tool of the hysterics, nascent totalitarians and fearmongers before.) Jensen had earlier pointed out that hospitals had financials incentives to use the pandemic as a default cause of death.
Jensen explains that while one would typically look to the “UCOD” or “Underlying Cause Of Death” for classification purposes rather than the “immediate” cause or the “intermediate” causes. The practice the CDC had always required in classifying deaths was to use the UCOD.
But for the Wuhan virus, the CDC practice of 17 years was changed, and physicians were told, “If someone had the pandemic virus, it doesn’t matter if it was actually the diagnosis that caused death. If someone had the virus, they died of it.” Stroke? Multi-organ failure? If the deceased tested positive for the Wahun virus, that was the cause of death. Franson and Jensen uncovered examples where victims of a fall were called pandemic casualties. Drowning victims. One “Covid 19” victim died after being thrown from a speeding automobile. About 800 of the 2,800 death certificates examined indicated that the virus was not the underlying cause of death. That’s a 40% overstatement.
It isn’t just Minnesota that’s doing this, either. It’s every state, and the whole country.
Why isn’t the news media explaining this to the public? Why aren’t government officials? Hell, why isn’t the President—he’s not usually shy about raising issues that the news media won’t?
These fake statistics are being used to terrify people and make them submissive to restrictions on their freedom. They are being used to justify killing jobs, industries, human relationships, communities, and the life experiences that Americans have fought and died for.
And if you guessed that this is a theme of “The Pandemic Creates A Classic And Difficult Ethics Conflict, But The Resolution Is Clear”, Part 3, coming soon to an ethics blog near you, you are correct…
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This is not nitpicking and is not intended to understate the reality that 2000 people in Minnesota died of Covid, but policies are being formed based on this data, policies that have real-world implications in terms of the health and well-being of everyone.
The other absurdity, more so I think than the fear of COVID but caused by it, is the separation of family members from each other – the lack of touch, hugs, in-person support. A dear friend’s husband, who she hasn’t been able to see in person since March because she is in a nursing home, just died of a heart attack. They were married for 53 years. She spoke to him via phone twice a day, every day, but was not allowed in-person visits from either him or her granddaughter who is a nurse.
How absolutely cruel is that…Incredibly heartbreaking. Where is the outrage?
The nursing home restrictions are not helping the residents. In many places, the majority of the COVID deaths are coming from the ‘locked down’ nursing homes. It is likely that the restrictions are actually CAUSING a lot of the deaths. The main cause of death from COVID seems to be from blood clots. Being restricted to your bed when at risk for blood clots is a terrible idea. So, why can’t people visit the nursing homes? Why can’t the residents move around? Are the people in charge willing to sacrifice that many lives and make everyone else miserable for the appearance of ‘doing something’, or is the death on purpose?
The same goes for the hospitals that deny dying people the ability to have a family member with them, to force them to die alone. How many of the elderly have died or suffered because they couldn’t have a relative with them when they went to their physician? I have an elderly in-law who was complaining for weeks about a series of health issues, but when she went to the office visit, she forgot to mention any of them because she is probably in the early stages of dementia. When people are brought in unconscious, it is the relatives that convey the necessary information to the hospital staff. What do they do now? They guess.
These are the policies of unfeeling and incompetent bureaucrats and a stark reminder that government power needs to be restricted.
Baseball’s propensity for counting things comes in handy: the stats website baseball-reference.com includes birth and death information for players. From that, you can pull up a list of players who died in a specific year:
https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/MLB/2020-deaths.shtml
They’re showing 111 deaths this year (could be a couple more reported in the next few days), as compared to 97 in 2019 and 98 in 2018. So reported deaths are about 15% higher, from covid, with covid, without covid, whatever.
Former and current MLB players is an interesting group to study, because it’s not easy to join, and you only leave it by death. So it’s a slowly changing group, with about 250 new players every year, and about 100 dying off. No women or children, of course. The 111 deaths included at least 10 black American players, and a dozen Latins, though there may be a few more I don’t recognize. Only two players under 40 died, one from gunshot and the other a plane crash.
And both of them might have been pandemic victims!
There is so little trust in the public health establishment.
You already wrote about how 1200 public health experts expressly declined to condemn Black Lives matter protests as risky for COVID-19 transmission.
Mark Ghaly recently reinforced this distrust when he said at a press briefing.
http://lbpost.com/news/restauration-new-years-eve-staying-open-outdoor-dining-illegal
People no longer want to obey these mandates, because of what Ghal.y said.
(Here is a hint: Ghaly’s idea was an abject failure).