In the last two-plus years, if you have ever thought that the COVID fatality numbers could be off then your reservations appear to have borne fruit.
According to Timcast, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (DPH) issued a press release late last week that announced that “4,081 deaths in Massachusetts that were previously counted as associated with COVID will be removed.”
However, the same press release stated that “approximately 400 deaths not previously counted but identified through a manual process of matching death certificates with medical records will be added to the COVID-19 death count.”
Therefore, the state will have a net removal of about 3,700 COVID deaths removed from their count.
As Timcast reported:
Massachusetts had previously defined a COVID-19 death as anyone who had the virus listed as their cause of death and anyone who had been diagnosed with COVID-19 during the 60 days prior to their death. The second group of people did not need to have COVID-19 listed as their cause of death to be included in the state’s total fatality count.[…]
Now only the deaths of people who had been diagnosed with COVID-19 three days prior to their death — regardless of their determining cause of death — can be included in the state’s totals.
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So they’re telling us that that if someone who died had COVID — a virus that typically lasts between one and three weeks, depending on the person — was counted as a COVID death if they contracted the virus within 60 days of their unfortunate passing? Really?
That’s two months, folks.
"Over time, our approach proved to be too expansive and led to a significant overcount of deaths in Massachusetts," DPH Commissioner Margret Cooke said, according to WCVB.
If we lived in a logical world, the only time that anyone’s death should be classified as a COVID death is if the virus directly contributed to their passing. That’s it. End of story. Do not pass go. Period.
Unfortunately, there’s a lot of money in medicine, which throws logic out of the conversation altogether.
By the way, anyone seen Fauci lately?