Death Certificates in Minnesota During the Epidemic

I ran across a paper in a CDC journal on deaths in Minnesota during the epidemic.  It was apparently written by many of the same workers at the Health Department who did such an outstanding job during the epidemic–not.  The intent was apparently to justify the pathetic job done of actually identifying people who died because of CV-19, which I know from my personal examination of Minnesota death certificates was greatly exaggerated, particularly among young people.  Anyone who ever had CV-19 and subsequently died at any point was basically treated as a CV-19 death.  The authors acknowledge that there are issues in how death certificates are filled out, but basically ignore those issues in concluding that they were very accurate sources of data for determining the mortality toll of the epidemic.

To really understand the toll of any epidemic you need to divide deaths into three basic buckets–people who got CV-19, had no significant underlying health issues and clearly died directly from the CV-19 infection; people who got CV-19, had significant underlying health issues and a CV-19 infection likely interacted with those other health issues to cause the death, in other words, the people might not have died at the time they did if they had contracted the infection, but they were in poor health and had short life expectancy; and three, people who got CV-19 but it doesn’t appear to actually have had any impact on their death which may have occurred at or around the time of the infection.  The last bucket includes people like George Floyd, who had CV-19 but died of a drug overdose.  Multiple deaths attributed to CV-19 were actually things like drug overdoses, car accidents and homicides.  Death certificates are a poor way to ascertain which bucket a death should go into, particularly when paired with CV-19 testing results, as these authors suggest be done.

According to the authors, death certificates correctly identified 96% of supposed CV-19 deaths, but missed an additional 4% or 483 deaths.  I am guessing most of these were of the positive CV-19 test sometime during your life variety.  In addition, death certificates had CV-19 as a cause of death in 413 cases where the authors deemed it not to be a cause of death.  The errors in attributing a death to CV-19 were quite high for children and for those in congregate living settings, such as nursing homes.  The finding on errors among children’s deaths is consistent with my review of death certificates for those under 30, although what I found was far higher than these authors indicate.   (CDC Article)

The real issue with CV-19 deaths was the determination of the authorities and “experts” to grossly exaggerate the toll of the virus in order to justify futile and damaging measures to suppress spread.  These ding-dongs wanted high numbers of deaths for that purpose and they were not interested in a truly accurate understanding of the number of deaths really caused by the virus.