The officials of a Californian county previously assumed that anyone who has died while infected with COVID has died because of the coronavirus itself. This obviously raises the theoretical possibility for the official COVID death toll to be exaggerated.
The Californian county in question is Alameda, and it now cuts its COVID death toll by about 25% after concluding that some of those deaths were not a “direct result” of the coronavirus, according to FoxNews.com. More precisely, the county narrowed down the total number of COVID deaths to 1,223 from 1,634. This will obviously cause huge waves of discontent and distrust of the people in the authorities.
“Clearly not caused by COVID”
Neetu Balram, who is a spokesperson for Alameda County Public Health, confirmed that some of the deaths “were clearly not caused by COVID”, as The Los Angeles Times reveals.
If we look at the overall reported numbers for infections and deaths caused by COVID-19 in the US, the country starts to look better and better compared to other periods. According to worldometers.info, there were only 6,408 infections and 164 deaths caused by the coronavirus in the US yesterday, which is a positive record in the context of the ongoing pandemic. The country has been dealing even with hundreds of thousands of infections in some days.
When announcing the changes, the officials of Alameda county used the example of a person who died in a car accident and tested positive for COVID. While considering the initial procedure, the person’s death would have been considered an outcome of the COVID infection, which is obviously absurd.
In a recent statement, the Alameda County Public Health Department said:
When the state implemented these guidelines, Alameda County became aware of the conflicting definitions and made a plan to conduct the update when cases and deaths stabilized.
For the entire Californian state, more than 63,000 people were reported to have died because of the coronavirus.
