The “official” coronavirus death tolls are about to be in question.
There were anecdotal stories of people who were on hospice but tested positive for coronavirus before they died but being counted as a coronavirus death. Then there was a report that New York State presumptively added thousands of deaths to their toll. In early April they declared 3,700 new coronavirus deaths that may have had zero correlation with the disease itself.
New York started including people who had never tested positive for the virus but were presumed to have died from it. These new figures drove up the number of people killed in New York City to more than 10,000 and increased the United States death count by 17% to more than 26,000. There have been ‘excess’ deaths in New York City since March so, according to the Left, that was the only thing that could’ve caused them. As the rest of us know, death does not follow a straight line, and you can’t really tell excess deaths until you get somewhere near the last quarter of the year.
Today, there’s a new one. In Ventura County, California a 37 year old who died of a drug overdose was counted in the coronavirus death toll. They didn’t even attempt to hide it. The announcement was made on the county’s official Facebook page. In the post, the County of Ventura shows the number of new cases, total cases, recovered cases, those in the ICU, those being tested, deaths, and age range. At the bottom of the post it says “Unfortunately, a 37-year-old male died as the result of a drug overdose with COVID-19 infection as a significant comorbidity and contributing condition. This is completely misleading.
With coronavirus or seasonal influenza deaths, pneumonia can be the immediate cause of death but one would probably refer to the actual cause of death as influenza-related pneumonia or some other terminology. For the government to refer to someone whom the county admits died of a drug overdose as a coronavirus casualty, that’s just fake news.
Ventura County, northwest of Los Angeles, is hardly a coronavirus hotspot anyway. They totaled at 17 deaths. Gov. Gavin Newsom has threatened “aggressive” measures against beachgoers in the county, forcing senior citizens at a local beach out of their chairs over the weekend.
But back to the drug overdose…county residents in the Facebook comments quickly jumped on the “blame the ‘Rona” bandwagon, inferring that the man “killed himself because he had coronavirus.” Studies have shown that men are much more likely to die of coronavirus than women, but for a 37-year-old man to die simply of coronavirus is not likely. Now if the man was a long-time drug addict whose lungs were ruined or had other significant pre-existing health conditions his chances of dying would be much higher. We don’t know if he was homeless, a working man, released from jail. We know nothing of this man except that his death has been tacked as another coronavirus number.
Data would be much more reliable if there was a separate statistic for people who died of an unrelated cause but also had tested positive for coronavirus. For now, the Liberals will be eating up the numbers and manipulating the public as best as they can.
