I just copied a FB image that a “friend” posted. It states that…
“I just heard a lady on a live broadcast that said her sister in law just died the other day from a heart attack and they told the family they were going to add she died of covid 19. The family said oh no our not, she died of a heart attack. The funeral director said were were told by the state that anyone who didnt die by a gun shot wound or car accident were tested as covid 19 victims. There has been people over and over who have been coming out telling people the numbers are a lie because they did the same thing with their loved ones. I just wanted to share this that the deaths need to be investigated.”
This sounds so outlandish. I’ve done my due diligence and searched and searched, but could find nothing on this, either true or false. I’m inclined to believe this to be fear mongering, but can’t verify anything about it.
I’m looking at my mother’s death certificate. It lists a proximate cause of death (dehydration) and an underlying cause of death (ovarian cancer), as well as the manner of death (natural).
The funeral director may have said something the family did not understand that statistics were being collected on Covid-19 positive cases, and proximate causes of death. If they notice patterns, like a rise in overall heart attacks in March-June 2020, and then look at the data, and see that 70% of heart attack victims during the period were Covid-19 positive, they will look further to see if the 30% who were negative had more risk factors than the 70% who were negative, so that the “negatives” were predictable heart attacks, and the positives were less so.
Well, then you start doing studies to see if Covid-19 directly attacks the heart in some way. If has huge implications for treatments.
The upshot may have been that if the SIL was positive, the family might be contacted in the future to ask about the SIL’s risk factors, lifestyle, and such.
I can see that, if the funeral was circumlocuting in order to try to make it not sound like she was being experimented on, he may have given the false impression that her specific case was still under investigation.
Death certificates are signed under penalty of perjury. If someone knowingly lists a false cause of death, it could result in prison time. Of course, small town coroners are political appointees, often funeral directors, or other non medical personnel. Inflating numbers on pandemic deaths may well have financial consequences, in which case, in addition to perjury it would be conspiracy to commit fraud, or perhaps grand fraud, if it was repeated.
The chances that a Facebook image, posted by person 1, relating an account of person 2, who heard person 3 on the radio about the death of person 4, relating what their family and/or mortician (persons 5-?) said being an accurate depiction of reality are so close to zero that I can’t imagine there’s a useful signal to extract from the noise here.
Right now if a person dies of something but they test their blood and find their are positive, I think they might list the cause as the virus even though it wasnt the cause.
For example THIS case in Connecticut an infant died from another cause, maybe trauma or abuse, but is officially listed as Covid 19 due to the baby having it.
And another question is if they are say 78 and die and had an underlying problem like maybe cancer, could they just as well have died just from an ordinary flu?
He’s the second person I’ve seen misrepresent that story in that way. The other said the baby’s caretaker suffocated it. But had no source.
I assume there’s some meme going around in the blogosphere about this, but since there aren’t any facts behind it, it’s getting twisted in different ways with every telling.
Where do you see that the baby died from another cause, much less maybe trauma or abuse? An autopsy was done and no other cause has been found although more tests are pending - in fact, the article says the cause of death is unknown not that this was a COVID- 19 death.
It might be the best way to know would be to compare death rates this year with last year at the same time. See for example:
There will eventually be estimates, using such methods, that are much more accurate than looking at death certificates in a country (really, a world) where autopsy has become rare in recent decades.
Some of the excess deaths will be from non-COVID-19 causes that weren’t treated well due to health system stress (or due to people with heart attacks and strokes being afraid to rush to a hospital treating COVID-19 patients). It will be hard to separate them out.
If I’ve done the math correctly, the expected number of deaths of all causes in an average US city with the population of NYC would be about 200* - so the number of COVID deaths in NYC is already well above the normal death rate.
US death rate 863.8 deaths per 100,000 per year. 863.8/365 gives 2.37 deaths per 100,000 per day - and since NYC has about 8.6 million people, we get 2.3786 or 200 deaths in NYC per day.
Especially since I saw the same, or nearly the same, meme.
I wouldn’t put it past Russia to be spreading such stories, if only to continue to sow discord, distrust of science and facts, and a lackadaisical attitude towards the virus.
This is definitely where the alt-right are going to go with COVID-19. They know Trump has botched the COVID-19 response, and so they have to come up with some to explain Dear Leader’s apparent failure. And that will be, he didn’t fail at all. The deaths are fake or inflated. There are still people running around saying the whole thing is a hoax. Among other conspiracy theories, like 5G networks cause it. Good grief. Sometimes it makes you wonder if it would be best if humanity did get wiped out. We’re so stupid.
Indeed. I’d like an answer to that too. I read the article, which is not very long at all and I don’t see where he got any of the claims he made. Well, one. Apparently a baby did die.
We, as a board fighting ignorance, should not allow this sort of blatant misrepresentation.
There is only so far denial and belief in hoaxes go. People are funny things. Often there is a tipping point where it runs the other way. Once people know or know of someone near who has died it gets personal.
Heck, I’m down here in Oz, we have had two days running where in a city of over a million we have had only two new cases. Yet a friend of my brother’s GF died in NYC. The bad story, healthy, not old, ill one day, hospital the next, dead the next. There is every expectation that most people will be touched by this before things are over.
It’s a tongue-in-cheek question, as I know exactly why he did it. There’s a certain narrative ringing around the the stupid-sphere that deaths are being misclassified to inflate the COVID count, and a certain type of person who is so excited about body-slamming the libs that they get a bad case of selective reading and motivated reasoning.
This pattern of behavior does not include returning to the thread to admit error or apology.
