The media told us that COVID death numbers shouldn’t be questioning COVID death numbers – anyone who did was called a conspiracy theorist.
Well, Massachusetts is dropping its COVID-19 death count by 3,700.
The reasoning?
They were using a bad system to count the numbers.
Massachusetts is dropping its COVID-19 death count by 3,700 people after adopting new criteria for determining deaths caused by the virus.
The Massachusetts Department of Public Health said Thursday that as of March 14, the state will update its criteria “to align with guidance from the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists.â€
Under the old criteria, the COVID-19 death definition applies not only to people who have COVID-19 listed as a cause of death on their death certificate, but also people who had a COVID-19 diagnosis within 60 days of their death but do not have COVID-19 listed as a cause of death on their death certificate.
Massachusetts’s new definition of a COVID-19 death tightens that diagnosis timeline from 60 days to just 30 days.
The new criteria will retroactively affect all deaths in Massachusetts since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020.
There were multiple bombshell claims made in the press release – here they are:
Beginning Monday, March 14, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (DPH) will update the criteria used for identifying COVID-19 deaths to align with guidance from the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists. Currently, the COVID death definition includes anyone who has COVID listed as a cause of death on their death certificate, and any individual who has had a COVID-19 diagnosis within 60 days but does not have COVID listed as a cause of death on their death certificate. The updated definition reduces this timeframe from 60 days to 30 days for individuals without a COVID diagnosis on their death certificate.
…
Massachusetts has applied this new definition retroactively to the start of the pandemic in March 2020. As a result, 4,081 deaths in Massachusetts that were previously counted as associated with COVID will be removed. In addition, approximately 400 deaths not previously counted but identified through a manual process of matching death certificates with medical records will be added to the COVID-19 death count. The state’s overall COVID death count, therefore, will decline by 3,700.
…
“It is important to understand that we cannot identify all COVID-19 deaths with 100 percent accuracy,†said Nicolas Menzies, Associate Professor of Global Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “The revised definition for COVID-19 deaths is a reasonable balance between sensitivity and specificity and will make it easier to compare Massachusetts death data with data from other jurisdictions.â€
…
Early in the pandemic, and absent clear national guidance, DPH matched COVID-19 surveillance case information with death certificates to identify deaths in people who tested positive for the virus but did not have COVID listed as a cause of death. To avoid the possibility of missing any COVID-associated death, anyone who tested positive for COVID and died was counted as a COVID-associated death regardless of the length of time between their diagnosis and their death or whether COVID was listed as the cause on their death certificate. This approach was overly broad and led to an overcounting of COVID-19-associated deaths.
Key Takeaways:
-COVID death count numbers are not gospel and should be questioned
-Those who questioned how hospitals were recording COVID deaths were right
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