Somehow 37 fewer people are dead today than were yesterday. Good news but what’s the secret treatment?
They’re feeling much better now.
[/monty python]
I know that Alameda County, California, just changed way it counted COVID deaths, reducing their number. Some cases that previously were assigned COVID had their cause of death changed:
From that link:
The county previously included any person who died while infected with the virus in the total COVID-19 deaths for the jurisdiction. Case in point: People who died in a car crashes and tested positive for COVID were counted in the county’s previous system even though they were not included in the state toll.
I’d heard rumors of such a thing, but generally discounted it as conspiracy theory nonsense. Is this actually widespread?
Cause of death is not a “clean” piece of data. And I’m told that typically, a death certificate lists more than one cause.
Yes, there were errors counting covid deaths in both directions, especially early in the pandemic. In general, more covid deaths were missed than non-covid deaths were counted, but there were certainly errors both ways. Most states have mostly cleaned up the data by now, and if you want to investigate this stuff you should download it now, not just add to the stuff you downloaded a year ago. Although… The excess covid deaths are easier to clean up than the missing ones, because missing ones don’t leave a lot of documentation, whereas excess ones would have a death certificate that says, for instance, both “auto accident” and “covid”, marking it as worth investigating.
Do they really test a mangled body for COVID? That seems hard to believe, especially early on when tests were scarce.
I assume it was someone who had previously tested positive for COVID that was in an auto accident.
I obliquely am aware of someone who was positive for COVID that died of natural causes whose death certificate did not list COVID at all. There were lots of things wrong with him that were the primary cause, but apparently the person who wrote the death certificate thought that they were by themselves enough to cause the death, even though they had been chronic things for years. It’s almost certain that COVID was the trigger that finally killed him, but it didn’t do anything specific that warranted mention on the death certificate apparently.
I also saw a death certificate in a new client’s paperwork that simply said “Covid-19” and nothing else at all.
The information obtained is potentially valuable. What if hypoxemia caused the driver to run into something?
174,376,256 total cases
3,751,988 dead
157,638,535 recovered
In the US:
34,227,237 total cases
612,701 dead
28,177,659 recovered
YesterdayTwo days ago’s numbers for comparison:
Wow! 
I’m lucky-I’ve only caught it sixteen times so far. 
174,749,069 total cases
3,762,883 dead
158,161,346 recovered
In the US:
34,242,866 total cases
613,052 dead
28,220,863 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
Here’s some news:
Three years in prison.
From that link:
…
Brandenburg is an admitted conspiracy theorist who believes he is a prophet and vaccines are a product of the devil. He also professed a belief that the Earth is flat and the 9/11 terrorist attacks were faked.Brandenburg also secretly substituted saline for flu vaccine that he was mandated to receive and persuaded several co-workers to secretly swap saline for their flu vaccine as well, according to court filings.
Dear God. These people aren’t always just harmless cranks in tinfoil hats.
We caught just this one guy. 18 months into this situation, and with the benefit of knowledge about how functionally insane about one half of our country is, how many thousand more do you suppose there are in the supply and distribution chain for vaccines and in the medical care industry?
Which was why I was delighted to feel like crap the day after my second Pfizer.
I believe this question was recently asked.
I don’t think this is that shocking. It was bound to happen as no vaccine is 100%. Just evidence that COVID is still real and we can’t just completely abandon everything we’ve learned.
In better news:
AP source: US to buy 500M Pfizer vaccines to share globally (apnews.com)
The US and Pfizer have agreed to make 500M doses of vaccine available to Covax, 200M to be delivered this year and the other 300M in the first half of 2022.
Hopefully, we will see more deals like this with various vaccines and various wealthy countries paying the cost.
In even betterer news:
That could be worth getting a second shot, LOL!