Literally no one has any idea how many people COVID-19 has killed - By Mike Thau (Coronavirus Conundrum - Is there anyone out there still sane?)

Every day you’re hearing an updated tally of the number of Americans who’ve “died” of COVID-19.

But if you want to understand a Chinese virus, you better start listening to a Chinese philosopher: As Confucius said, “The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names.”

And, it’s time everyone wised up about those daily COVID-19 fatality reports. They don’t represent the number of people it's killed. They represent the number of death certificates listing it as a cause. And those two things are most definitely NOT the same.

We know with absolute certainty that CDC guidelines for filling them out mean people with mild cases who die of some unrelated disease get added to the virus’s death toll. And 80% of COVID-19 infections have symptoms way too mild to kill anyone. In fact, a lot of people get no symptoms at all.

We even know that people who aren’t infected with the virus are getting counted as fatalities.

The truth is that no one has any idea how many Americans COVID-19 has killed. Except that it’s got to be a lot fewer than the number being reported.

Item 1. If you die while infected with COVID-19, it gets listed as a cause on your death certificate, regardless of how mild it was or anything proving some other disease was the true culprit.

According to Coronavirus Task Force coordinator, Dr. Birx herself:

If someone dies with COVID-19, we are counting that as a COVID-19 death.

The Task Force’s unofficial leader, Dr. Fauci says:

I can’t imagine if someone comes in with coronavirus, goes to an ICU, and they have an underlying heart condition and they die—they’re going to say, ‘Cause of death: heart attack.’ I cannot see that happening.

For whatever reason, the medical experts in charge have decided on guidelines that are bound to add a lot of people who would have died of some other disease anyway to COVID-19's death stats.

Dying with the virus is being intentionally conflated with dying from it.

Item 2. The CDC is explicitly directing doctors to list COVID-19 on death certificates even when no test was done as long as they’ve "assumed" the patient had it.

A March 24 Q&A style memo the CDC sent out directing doctors on how to fill out death certificates is explicit about it:

Should “COVID-19” be reported on the death certificate only with a confirmed test?
COVID-19 should be reported on the death certificate for all decedents where the disease

No reason for the “assumption” is required. And the emphasis at the end isn't mine, it's the CDC's. COVID-19 diagnoses are being encouraged, not just without a test, but without any medical justification.

They’re also being rewarded:

Item 3. Hospitals will be reimbursed for treating any uninsured patients diagnosed with COVID-19. Medicare will also pay out more for checking the COVID-19 box.

So, on top of directives encouraging and even straightforwardly implying that many death certificates will falsely list COVID-19 as a cause, there are also enormous financial incentives to create more.

As Dr. Scott Jensen, told Laura Ingraham,  

"If that COVID-19 patient goes on a ventilator, you get $39,000; three times as much. Nobody can tell me, after 35 years in the world of medicine, that sometimes those kinds of things [have] impact on what we do."

In other words, when you incentivize something – whether it’s solar power, illegitimacy, or false medical diagnoses – you get more of it.

The question isn’t whether COVID-19's fatality numbers are inflated, it’s by how much.  And the answer appears to be, “a lot”:

Item 4: Results of (i) mass testing in Chicago, (ii) analysis of virus strains from New York, and (iii) medical data from California all indicate that the spread of COVID-19 was well underway at least half a month before the repressive measures inflicted to contain it even began.

Italian scientists suspect the same is true there. Evidence from China suggests the virus started spreading at least three weeks before the date reported.

The California data indicates COVID-19 had already surged in February. Why didn’t anyone notice a spike in deaths back when it actually began spreading? And what’s causing the present increase in death certificates listing COVID-19 as a cause? Even if it hadn’t already peaked, our strict regime of social distancing ought to have slowed the growth of an already spreading pathogen.

Finally, some enlightening numbers:

Around 2000 Americans on average die in hospitals every day. So, from March 13 to April 11, at least around 60,000 people should have passed away in hospitals from causes other than COVID-19. Suppose that the policies and financial incentives creating false COVID-19 diagnoses caused the virus to be listed on just 1/6 of those normally occurring death certificates. That would mean the actual number of COVID-19 fatalities is around half the roughly 20,000 reported on April 12.

If 1/3 of the people who would have died of other causes anyway wound up with COVID-19 on their death certificate, that would be enough to account for roughly every single death certificate listing COVID-19 as a cause.

We’ll likely never know how many people COVID-19 is really killing. Policies have been implemented that so blatantly inflate the numbers we’re getting that it has to be intended. Moreover, absolutely no effort has been made to provide us with meaningful data about how many extra people are actually dying. So, not only don’t we know, nobody has any interest in us finding out.

In fact, nobody seems very interested in finding out themselves since it doesn't even look like real data are being compiled. Dr. Fauci and the other medical bureaucrats in charge are content to make sure the numbers are exaggerated as much as possible. They've indicated zero interest in finding out how many extra people are really dying because of COVID-19.

But we do know that death certificates are inflating COVID-19's true death toll. Just like those early false claims that it was “34 times” more deadly than the flu when even Dr. Fauci now quietly admits their fatality rates are exactly the same. And just like both those computer models that predicted catastrophes and wereultimately proven worthless.

Moreover, a huge chunk of death certificates must be falsely listing COVID-19 as a cause of death if, as appears to be the case, the virus was spreading a month before we started doing any testing without anyone noticing an unusual number of bodies piling up.

The COVID-19 death tallies we’re seeing are really death certificate tallies and we’ve no reason to trust them. But we’ve every reason to think they’ve got to be significantly exaggerating the real number of people the virus is killing. And there are enough hospital deaths from other causes every day that the directives and financial incentives encouraging false diagnoses only have to cause the virus to appear on a small percentage of ordinarily occurring death certificates to account for most of the deaths currently attributed to COVID-19. In fact, as hard as it may be to fathom, it would be more likely that no one has died of COVID-19 than that the numbers we’re getting don’t significantly over-represent those who have.

Exactly how much COVID-19 deaths are being exaggerated, though, is anyone’s guess.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/literally_no_one_has_any_idea_how_many_people_covid19_has_killed.html