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If you examine the following article you will find a discussion of a Republican doctor who claims that the CDC is grossly inflating COVID-19 death statistics. Are the Republicans just making this stuff up or is there even the slightest reason to believe it? So I have a theory about where this baseless story came from which I present here. Its total speculation on my part so dont go around saying this is what happened. I am just thinking out loud.
First the article. The doctor in question is midway through the story.
Now for my theory. Did you know that we dont know how many people die of the flu each year? Well we dont and the CDC admits its statistics are wrong. There are a number of reasons for this and they are not because of bad people doing bad things, unfortunately because that (bad people) would be easier to fix. Here are two examples of why the statistics understate the real numbers. In the first scenario, someone goes to the hospital with bad flu and dies of cardiac failure. Now, did that person die of a heart attack or did that person die from the flu? What do you put in the "cause of death" field on the form? In the second scenario, someone gets bad flu and dies at home and nothing is reported because the person was old, and got sick, and it doesnt seem important to report the cause of death in a way that the CDC can capture. Maybe the cause of death is reported as "complications of old age". In this case, its quite possible that "flu" was never formally diagnosed. The flu has been with us a long time, most people think it is the same as the "common cold". It just doesnt get reported.
But in the case of COVID which is very different from the flu and much more dangerous (at least until the really bad flu like 1918 comes around again) the CDC wanted to make sure that the cases of COVID-19 got reported and the cause of death correctly attributed. So my guess is that they sent out information fliers requesting local doctors and hospitals to be particularly diligent and if there were multiple probable causes of death, to make sure that COVID-19 is listed. And of course our nutty Republicans who are not too smart saw this as a conspiracy to inflate the figures.
I dont know if this is even close to what happened. But I would like to believe that our Republicans are just stupid and paranoid and wrong but not deliberately malicious about distorting information that can and does cause the death of otherwise clueless people. That would be negligent, criminally negligent. I hope therefore that the Republicans are just wrong. Maybe they just heard a rumor made up by some paranoid nut like the Trump moron and just took it at face value and repeated it. Maybe the CDC did nothing at all. Maybe we will never know why the Republicans believe the nutty things they believe.
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