'The numbers are skewed': Colorado officials warn of inflated COVID death statistics

[PeteS in CA]

'The numbers are skewed': Colorado officials warn of inflated COVID death statistics

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/numbers-are-skewed-colorado-officials-warn-inflated-covid-deaths

Multiple public officials in Colorado are warning that the state's official COVID-19 death count is skewed due to the practice of conflating patients who have died directly due to the disease with those who have merely tested positive for it prior to death.

Data experts and health officials have long struggled to separate out those two key data points in government tallies of COVID deaths, leading to accusations that the death rate for the disease is being inflated modestly or even significantly.

Multiple public officials in Colorado, meanwhile, told "Full Measure" host Sharyl Attkisson that they had personally observed death tallies that erred on the side of COVID, leading to death counts that were effectively misleading to the public.

Brenda Bock, the county coroner for Grand County, told Attkisson that in November she processed a murder-suicide case "and the very next day it showed up on the state website as COVID death."

[Smokin Joe]

Not surprised. North Dakota breaks it down to those who have died of COVID on the death certificate vs those who died with COVID, but the sum is presented as the final number, and even that breakdown does not preclude inflation in the former category.

[PeteS in CA]

Several counties in California did a review of "Covid deaths" recently and found ~25% were tested positive for Covid but died of something unrelated. I cannot say that is typical, because I don't know enough, but I would be unsurprised if many states and counties have similarly inflated Covid deaths numbers. And, yeah, Because Trump was probably a motive for numbers inflation throughout most of 2020, plus a bit of bureaucratic inertia spilling into 2021.