Horowitz: Colorado coroner accuses state of classifying gun deaths as COVID deaths

Many parts of the country are suffering from record homicides this year. How many of them are being classified as COVID-19 deaths?

This might sound like a frivolous question, but based on concerns raised by one Colorado coroner, along with other trends we are seeing in the data, one has to wonder how far the net of COVID-19 death counting sweeps.

Earlier this week, Grand County coroner Brenda Bock called out the Colorado Department of Health for listing two of the county's five recent deaths as deaths among those with COVID-19, even though they died of gunshot wounds.

Earlier this year, the state got a lot of blowback from other coroners after young people who died of alcohol poisoning were found to be listed in the coronavirus death count. Colorado cleaned up its act better than most states by distinguishing between "deaths due to COVID-19" and "deaths among COVID-19 cases."

However, Bock seems to be concerned that there is still a needless stigma attached to the county if it has a higher tally of deaths "among" COVID cases. One would still expect COVID to have had some contribution to death in order to be listed in this latter category, even if it's not the primary cause of death on the death certificate. But to include gunshot victims is a sham. We have never recorded death data like this in any form.

"It's absurd that they would even put that on there," Bock told county commissioners, according to KCNC-TV Denver. "Would you want to go to a county that has really high death numbers? Would you want to go visit that county because they are contagious. You know I might get it, and I could die if all of a sudden one county has a high death count. We don't have it, and we don't need those numbers inflated."

The state told Bock that anyone who dies within 30 days of testing positive must be included in one of the categories of COVID deaths. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that, with 2 million tests conducted a day and with roughly 60,000 people dying naturally every week, there is a lot of bogus counting that overlaps with natural death or other causes of early death.

The two deaths under discussion are believed to have been a murder-suicide case in Frasier, Colorado, where the husband is suspected of shooting his wife before taking his own life. While this situation was unique, one has to wonder how many of the growing street homicides are also included in the tally. In May, the Freedom Foundation confirmed from Washington state officials that gunshot victims are indeed included in the death tally if they tested positive for COVID-19 prior to being shot.

This is not the first time coroners have disputed death claims. In May, Pueblo County Coroner Brian Cotter accused the state of inflating the numbers and noted that none of the 14 recorded deaths in the county at the time were directly caused by the virus. The Armstrong County, Pennsylvania, coroner also accused Pennsylvania's department of health of putting out "misleading statistics" on death numbers in his county.

If states are so liberal in including younger people who died untimely deaths due to drugs, alcohol, or motorcycle accidents, then we can only imagine how many deaths of elderly people who were within a few months of dying have not been verified to have been caused directly by COVID.

Recent data from Sweden sheds light on the fact that the majority of deaths are not just regular seniors but those who are dying of other ailments in the final months of their lives. The Swedish study of 122 people who were recorded as dying outside the hospital of the virus in the Östergötland region (51% of all reported deaths) found that "111 of the deceased outside the hospital had extensive comorbidity." (Translated by Google.) Additionally, half of them were over 88 years old. The review found that COVID-19 was the "direct cause of death" in just 15% of cases and that "very many of those who died with covid-19 outside the hospital had expected short survival."

There's no reason to believe we are not experiencing a similar dynamic here in the United States.

Another overlooked factor in the method of counting deaths is that, ironically, the lockdowns themselves have caused an enormous number of excess deaths among younger people, mainly through record suicides and drug overdoses. The CDC estimates that a record 81,000 people died of drug overdoses for the 12-month period ending this past May, shattering the previous record set in 2017 before the numbers started coming down. Those numbers likely accelerated since May. Remember, at any given moment, 10% of the population could easily test positive for the virus when it is spreading, even if they are asymptomatic. What percentage of those lockdown-induced drug deaths were also counted as COVID-19 deaths?

It doesn't mean this virus hasn't induced any early death or tragic untimely deaths, but why do the media and political class have a motivation to obsessively count everything in the most absurd way in order to produce the most morbid news headlines? Well, when the vaccine becomes widely available and the utter fascism still continues, you will know the answer.