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Are the COVID-19 Death Numbers Correct?
Are Those Deaths Really Pres. Trump’s Fault?
A yard sign on Route 1a in Fort Fairfield purports 185,000 COVID-19 deaths are all President Trump’s fault. But, according to the U.S. CDC and research done by the New York Times, the COVID-19 numbers now appear to be egregiously over counted and need to be adjusted downward by as much as 90% or more in order to more accurately reflect reality. photo/David Deschesne
By: David Deschesne
September 9, 2020
Running out of things to blame on President Trump, Democrats are now flinging as much mud against the wall as they can to see how much of it will stick. With their most recent mud-slinging, Democrats are attempting to politically capitalize on the deaths of COVID-19 victims by promoting a death number now known to be hugely exaggerated, then unfairly attributing those deaths to President Trump.
While Trump may be a bombastic Twitterholic (we really need to get a grownup in charge of his P.R.), it isn’t fair to blame him for COVID-19 deaths, exaggerated numbers or not.
In January, two months before the outbreak in the U.S. (officially mid-March, but there are signs that COVID-19 blew through much of the Northern part of the U.S. December 2019 thru February 2020), President Trump ordered all air travel from China to be put on hold. At the time, Democrats vehemently called him racist and xenophobic for those actions, but quieted down after more about the China/COVID-19 connection with their media darling, Dr. Anthony Fauci became known. Relying on the exceedingly short attention span of the average American, Democrats then shifted to simply blaming Trump for the coronavirus outbreak and now, the subsequent deaths.
With current deaths attributed to COVID-19 somewhere around 180,000, there appear to be some cracks forming in the narrative that may cause that excessively high number to come tumbling down to reality very soon.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control reports that as of August 22, 2020, the 161,000 deaths then attributed to COVID-19 may be unfairly inflated. In their weekly report on comorbidities, the CDC noted that only around 6% of the deaths attributed to COVID-19 actually had COVID-19 listed as their only cause. For all other deaths anywhere from 2 to 3 other comorbidities were also listed Some people died with only trace amounts of virus particle in them, but still got labeled a ‘COVID death.’ This means the 151,000+ other deaths attributed to COVID-19 were from people who already were suffering from other ailments that could have just as easily killed them, even if there was no coronavirus outbreak. These death statistics get lost in the mainstream media reporting in order to give the illusion of massive death numbers when the CDC estimates only around 9,700 actually died from COVID-19 exclusively so far this year. See full story here.
To put things in perspective, the CDC statistics year over year show that there are 220,000 deaths in the U.S. every single month from all causes, not related to COVID-19. Even if 180,000 is the right number of COVID-19 deaths, it only represents an excess of less than one month’s worth of regular deaths in the U.S.
Furthermore, on August 29, 2020, the New York Times published a revealing story on how the much relied-on RT-PCR tests were adjusted to be too sensitive and that as many as 90 percent of them were triggering on virus RNA particles of so small a number that the people receiving the positive test result were likely not even infected, or contagious to begin with (they were labeled “asymptomatic”). See that story here.
Furthermore, a PCR test protocol used by the World Health Organization has been found to be tainted with a DNA strand from human chromosome 8. Tests using this protocol will likely trigger positive on the naturally occurring DNA and register it as COVID-19 positive when the person tested may in fact not be infected at all. See that story here.
Given the CDC’s downward estimate of 94% for true COVID-19 deaths and the New York Times’ research showing a possible 90% reduction in the “positive” case numbers would be required to more accurately reflect reality, the true number of deaths that can be accurately and objectively attributed to COVID-19 lands somewhere between 9,700 and 18,500. So, using the 185,000+ death statistic for COVID-19 is now becoming increasingly unrealistic.
Trump’s Failure?
Hyperbole aside, there really isn’t much that can be blamed on Trump at this point. He did shut down air travel when the opposing party chose to politicize the move; he did take steps to make sure there were enough ventilators and even made several U.S. Navy “mercy ships” available to the large cities who needed them - though the outbreak wasn’t anywhere near as bad as errantly forecast and those ships and ventilators went largely unused.
The devastating economic collapse that occurred throughout the 43 states that did institute a catastrophic lockdown of all business and economic activity wasn’t Trump’s fault at all. The governors of those states - predominantly Democrat - are the people who made the decision to crash their own state’s economies and thrust millions of people out of work. President Trump had nothing to do with that, though he has been working with Congress to help alleviate the financial Armageddon with some token unemployment benefits and “payroll protection” loans as well as a $1,200 gift to nearly every taxpayer in the U.S. in May to help them make ends meet.
So, politics and hyperbole aside, Trump may be a hugely unpopular president among some segments of society, but it is unfair and untenable to attribute an exaggerated death claim for an even more exaggerated pandemic virus. This is especially true when we are now finding out the state governors’ overreaction may have in fact cost more lost lives from other causes than from the COVID-19 virus. These deaths range from suicide, murder/suicide, poverty, drug overdoses, and despair to the reduced ability to provide health care services for heart attack victims and cancer patients while the hospitals were ordered to stop all non-COVID related services in April; and the increased strain placed on the bodies of alcoholics and cigarette smokers, who ramped up their respective vices in an attempt to cope with the increased social and financial stress imposed on them by lockdowns and unemployment. The fault for those deaths lie solely on the State governors - not President Trump.