There is an old expression that figures do not lie, but liars figure. We seem to be experiencing that phenomenon in conjunction with the death rate from the COVID-19 pandemic.
At the time of this writing, the official number of deaths in the United States stands at 85,754 – and rising. If you follow the reporting, you find that both the left and the right, Democrats and Republicans, Trump haters and Trump fans all seem to agree that the stated number is not correct.
If you are a left-leaning Democrat Trump hater, you will believe the reports that there are more deaths than officially reported – a lot more. Some even say that the number of COVID-19 death exceeds 200,000 – and will reach a million before the end of the year. You will never see that number in any official report, but merely in politically based projections.
Of course, logic alone would suggest that there are likely to be people who died from COVID-19 that are not counted in the official reports. Dr. Anthony Fauci conceded that likelihood. That does not mean they are as extensive as the left-leaning, Democrat Trump-haters claim. Their figure is not prompted by data or logic, but by a visceral hatred of the President. Those exaggerated numbers are advanced by reporters, pundits and politicians – not credible or knowledgeable medical professionals.
On the other side of the divide, we have those who believe the numbers are overstated. Furthermore, recent media reports claim that the White House was manipulating the numbers to lower the death count. But as with everything anti-Trump, there is more to the story.
Interestingly, the news reports were alluding to comments made by Dr. Deborah Birx – who, along with Dr. Anthony Fauci, is half the two-person team heralded as the ultimate professional authorities. What she said was not new, other than the fact that she was the one who said it. That should have given it heightened credibility, but it ran crosscurrent to the media’s never-say-anything-good-about-Trump narratives.
She opined that there should be a recalculation of the death numbers. She made two points. Birx suggested that those whose deaths were not confirmed to be from COVID-10 should be separated out. These are folks in which there is no medical evidence that the deceased had COVID-19.
Now let us ponder that for a moment. Apparently, in some thousands of cases, it was only ASSUMED that they died from COVID-19. There was no evidence that they even had the virus. They were never tested for the virus before or after they died. At best, it was a probability – a guess by a doctor or coroner.
At a time when we are told to look at the data, the facts, the evidence, we discover that a whole bunch of death statistics are based on nothing more than a hunch. That should never have been the case – and the media should be joining Birx’s suggestion that the record be corrected.
Birx also suggested that we should review the data to separate those who died FROM the virus and those who only died coincidentally WITH the virus. A couple of weeks ago, there was the case of a toddler who was said to have died from COVID-19. He was infected, but he died as a result of an accident in the home.
The FROM or WITH issue is particularly significant with the elderly – especially those in the nursing homes. There is a significant number of those who died in final care facilities were terminally ill – on the verge of death from all sorts of debilities – COPD, cancer, Parkinson and other life-ending maladies.
The critical question is whether we want to know what the real death rate is. Those on the left seem to want to advance some unrealistically high fanciful number of their own creation for political reasons. They also want to count cases where it is unknown if the person even had COVID-19, much less died from it. And finally, they do not wish to know who actually died FROM COVID-19 and who might have died with it.
Despite their lip service to seeking the facts … the truth … the left seems only interested in advancing an unsubstantiated number that serves their political agenda. As with the economy, the left operates on a worse-is-better strategy – and they will do whatever is necessary to make matters worse.
So. There ‘tis.