Could it be?
Appearing Thursday, April 9 on former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s radio program, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo gave voice to a point many conservatives and individualists have been saying for weeks.
All of the projections, by the way, all those statisticians have been 100 percent wrong at this point… And we’ve been following the models because that was the only blueprint, but they haven’t turned out to be correct.
This is interesting.
When the virus emerged in China, keen observers knew not to trust the numbers coming from the Asian “Ministry of Truth”. When the virus tore through Italy, Americans could not get a proper handle on either the numerators or denominators for the number of infections, ill, the asymptomatic, or those who had died from the disease or died from comorbidity factors like old age and smoking.
As the virus spread, we heard about faulty test kits here in the US making it difficult to get a handle on early cases in Seattle.
And now, more information is coming to light – information that makes one wonder if Mr. Cuomo might be right.
As Tom Pappert writes for NationalFile:
Cuomo noted that the city is seeing (fewer) cases, people who need ventilators, and deaths from coronavirus.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the "National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases" and a member of the Coronavirus task force flatly denies that the COVID-19 fatality numbers are inflated.
Appearing on NBC’s “Today” the same morning as Cuomo joined Giuliani, Fauci listened to Savannah Guthrie ask:
You weighed in on a theory that’s been floating around that, perhaps, the number of fatalities related to COVID-19 is being inflated because people are actually dying of other things. Uh. What’s your read on that theory?
Well, her phrasing, “the number of fatalities related to COVID-19” cannot be overlooked, because it goes directly to the heart of the problem. There is a difference between “relation” and “cause”. More on that in a moment…
Fauci’s response?
You know, Savannah, there is absolutely no evidence that that’s the case at all. You know, I think it falls under the category of something that’s very unfortunate, these conspiracy theories that we hear about.
The term “conspiracy theory” connotes dark delusion, unrealistic and unsubstantiated accusations of people working together for some nefarious ends.
But, before insulting those who’ve been trying to make sense of the nonsensical COVID-19 data coming from Dr. Fauci’s government friends, perhaps we should look at the statement of one of his associate Dr. Deborah Birx, “Response Coordinator” for the COVID-19 Task Force. When asked at a White House meeting on April 7 if she could “talk about your concerns about deaths being misreported, by Coronavirus, because of either testing or standards for how they are characterized?”
She openly admitted that the government casts such a wide definitional net, one might wonder what it’s catching.
So, I think in this country, we’ve taken a very liberal approach to mortality…
“Liberal,” as in broad.
There are other countries that if you had a preexisting condition, and, let’s say the virus caused you to go to the ICU and then have a heart or kidney problem, some countries are recording that as a heart issue, or a kidney issue, and not a COVID-19 death.
But, without knowing detailed specifics of every death, without knowing the degree of morbidity due to underlying preexisting conditions, and without an idea of the severity of the COVID-19 symptoms, any fair researcher would find it unreasonable to count all such deaths as COVID-19 caused.
And there’s a big difference between “related” and “caused”. Which brings us to something else that Birx added.
If someone dies with COVID-19, we are counting that as a COVID-19 death.
For the sake of science, stress the word “with”. Taken literally, this statement means that if someone dies from cancer, or even suicide, but tests positive for COVID-19, the government could include the fatality as a “COVID-19 death”.
One day later, on April 8th, Birx defended the numbers when asked if the death toll is inflated.
We've made it very clear, I think every time I've been up here, about the co-morbidities. Most of the people, and we talked about the Italy data, the majority of the Italians who have succumbed to this had three or more co-morbidities. So, this has been known from the beginning. Those individuals will have an underlying condition, but that underlying condition did not cause their acute death when it’s related to a [COVID-19] infection. In fact, it’s the opposite.
Others express that people may "sort of game the numbers." Minnesota State Senator, Dr. Scott Jensen said as much on April 6 with FoxNews’ Laura Ingraham, Ms. Ingraham actually read CDC guidelines for counting COVID-19 deaths, saying:
In cases where a definite diagnosis of COVID cannot be made but is suspected or likely (e.g. the circumstances are compelling within a reasonable degree of certainty) it is acceptable to report COVID-19 on a death certificate as ‘probable’ or ‘presumed.’
When she asked him what the problem was with that, he responded:
Well, in short, it’s ridiculous… The determination of the cause of death is a big deal; it has impact on estate planning, it has impact on future generations. And the idea that we’re going to allow people to massage and sort of game the numbers is a real issue…
Thanks to the new federal COVID-19 “CARES” bill passed in DC, gaming the numbers could become an even bigger issue. It turns out that the feds are going to “reimburse” (what a quaint nonsense term that is) hospitals more for patients listed as COVID-19 victims than what the feds will pay for non-COVID patients.
As Montana-based physician Dr. Annie Bukacek notes about the CDC and COVID-19: “They automatically overestimate the real (COVID-19) death numbers, by their own admission,” even as hospitals are given permission to do so and may be economically incentivized to do just that.
Remember Dr. Fauci is not infallible. Goodness knows, when, on February 26, he said that a travel ban wasn’t going to happen, he was wrong. And he added that such an idea would be “impossible” once a virus had spread to multiple nations, but later contradicted himself by saying in March that a travel ban was “the right call.”
Perhaps Cuomo is right. Perhaps one cannot be certain about any of the pandemic numbers that are being reported. There are certainly a lot of questions surrounding them.