In late September 2021, one of our readers finally got an answer to a burning question:
How many Dane County COVID deaths—to that point—were due solely to COVID-19?
Early on in the COVID debacle, a friend from Milwaukee had sent her data received through an open records request to the Milwaukee County Medical Examiner’s Office—a detailed spreadsheet providing demographic and co-morbidity information for COVID deaths in Milwaukee County through May 3, 2020, all in neatly arranged columns. We’ve provided that spreadsheet below so you, too, can view it:
You’ll note that nearly all of the Milwaukee deaths in May of 2020 remained among the elderly. The average decedent age was 74 years, with median slightly higher at 76 years. No surprise there. Moreover, in tabulating pre-existing conditions, the Medical Examiner had very neatly figured an average of 2.56 co-morbidities per COVID death. The sheet even notes that all deaths under the age of 55 were co-morbid for obesity. The Milwaukee County data gives the lie to any pretensions that COVID-19, on its own, was a health crisis.
The Milwaukee data naturally raised questions for our reader about Dane County’s COVID deaths. She reached out to the Medical Examiner’s office here, only to learn that, unlike its counterpart in Milwaukee, the office keeps no detailed records on natural or disease-related deaths. However, the agency helpfully suggested that she contact the State of Wisconsin’s Vital Records Department to see if a survey of death certificates might yield some insight into COVID deaths and co-morbidities.
Vital Records failed to respond to email or phone contact, so our reader next reached out to the Public Health Division of the State Department of Health Services (DHS), under which Vital Records is actually housed. From there her question was directed to Matthew Wallock, the Health Analytics Section Manager for the Office of Health Informatics.
Here’s what Wallock’s query of Dane County death certificates revealed, nearly 21 months into the so-called pandemic:
That’s right…Just 7 Dane County death certificates attributed COVID as the sole cause of death.
The section manager included the following clarifying remarks:
Information on COVID-19 cases is collected through the standard communicable disease surveillance system used for all other reportable communicable diseases in Wisconsin. Laboratories and health care providers are required to report information (including the person’s name, birth date, address, type of test, test result) on cases of COVID-19 (and other reportable communicable diseases) to DHS. This information is most often transmitted to us and local health departments into the Wisconsin Electronic Disease Surveillance System (WEDSS) through an electronic submission or data feed. As you can see below, it’s not uncommon that comorbidity information is left out of a WEDSS report of a death.
One question we regularly receive is what “counts” as a COVID-related death. DHS classifies deaths according to the national standard case definition outlined by the CDC and the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists. According to that definition, COVID-19 deaths are those that have a death certificate that lists COVID-19 disease or SARS-CoV-2 as an underlying cause of death or a significant condition contributing to death. Deaths must be reported by health care providers or medical examiners/coroners and recorded in WEDSS by local health departments in order to be counted as a COVID-19 death. Deaths among people with COVID-19 that were the result of non-COVID reasons (e.g., accident, overdose, etc.) are not included as a COVID-19 death. Accordingly, if the death certificate indicates that the cause of death was a result of reasons not related to COVID-19 and COVID-19 is not listed on the death certificate as contributing to the death, the person is not included as a COVID-19 death.
A month later, our reader checked back to see if the numbers had changed significantly. Wallock sent her updated Dane County numbers through October 27, 2021, now nearly 22 months into the so-called pandemic:
As you can see, the number in the “NO” column hadn’t budged, though the number in the “UNKNOWN” column had risen by 20.
Remember what the section manager clarified: In order to count as a COVID death in Wisconsin, a death certificate must list COVID-19 disease or SARS-CoV-2 “as an underlying cause of death or a significant condition contributing to death” and “must be reported by health care providers or medical examiners/coroners and recorded in WEDSS by local health departments.”
SEVEN death certificates listing COVID as a sole cause of death. Which amounts to 1.9% of the 371 COVID deaths Dane County was claiming on October 27, 2021. It is unlikely that the percentage has remained even that high, considering that, five months later, the county’s claimed death toll has risen only to 470 (as of March 30, 2022). If we assumed the percentage has been sustained, Dane County would still only be able to claim approximately 9 deaths attributable solely to COVID-19 and its alleged variants.
Let’s give Public Health Madison & Dane County (PHMDC) the benefit of the doubt for just one more moment. Let’s assume that all 179 of the deaths for which co-morbidity status was unknown on October 27, 2021, were due to COVID alone. Even if that were true, Dane County would then be able to claim only 186 indisputable COVID deaths as of that date, essentially cutting in half its legitimate COVID death toll over nearly two years. Because the presence of co-morbidities—serious pre-existing, underlying health conditions—do make any given COVID death utterly disputable. A significant number of COVID-attributed deaths with co-morbidities, probably most of them, should never have been counted in Dane County’s death toll.
How is a death toll of 186 over 22 months worse than seasonal flu or pneumonia, which both claim lives every year?
The DHS data makes it impossible to ignore the utter travesty of the last two years of emergency orders and nonsensical policies in Dane County…the sheer futility, needlessness, and, quite frankly, evil of the way this county's so-called leadership smashed up:
human lives
relationships
community
trust
civic life
businesses
jobs
economy
Think about this devastation when you vote in the spring election on Tuesday, April 5th.
Oh, but wait…! Did you think that was all? Nope. There’s more…
Our reader sent a follow-up email to her initial September query, asking whether it was possible to obtain more detailed co-morbidity information, such as that provided by Milwaukee County. Here’s an excerpt from the reply she received. She was told that it would be impossible to provide such information without crossmatching information from other databases to which Wallock claimed to have no access. It’s hard to know how honest that answer was. However, he said something else that should, on its face, raise your eyebrow:
I first want to clarify a few different things. Death certificates will list significant contributing conditions to a death. While these are all technically comorbidities [sic], many are resultant from the COVID-19 infection. For example, many COVID-19 deaths list pneumonia as a contributing cause of death. That, of course, doesn’t mean the decedent had pneumonia prior to acquiring COVID. Rather, they most likely contracted pneumonia as a consequence of their COVID infection.
See what Wallock said there…? He’s claiming that a co-morbidity can result from COVID.
I checked with an M.D., just to be sure I wasn’t imagining the redefinition of language in the above response. The M.D. confirmed that “[c]o-morbidities have to be present prior to COVID for them to count.”
Have DHS and Public Health Madison & Dane County been counting pneumonia and other conditions resulting from COVID as co-morbidities all along, in contravention of standard practice…? If so, then the State of Wisconsin has likely inflated COVID deaths even further than we already knew, and that includes Dane County’s toll.
Such manipulation would hardly be surprising, considering DHS and PHMDC’s alignment with CDC’s nonsensical guidelines for most of the “pandemic”—for instance that anyone testing positive at time of death counted as a COVID death, whether COVID actually contributed to that death or was merely incidental. And I’m not even touching the realities of the PCR testing fraud; that’s for another day.
Our reader sent two additional requests for updated death certificate data. The first was sent to Wallock in late December 2021. A second request was sent to the DHS Public Health Division that had initially forwarded her inquiry to Wallock. Both requests went unacknowledged. I guess DHS doesn’t want to discuss this topic any further.
But we should.
One last thing, just for kicks. Wallock didn’t just send Dane County data. He ran the numbers for the whole state as a bonus. If the Dane County data troubles you—and it should—considering the state data will trouble you more:
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