Friday, December 18, 2020

Ten Mouseclicks
















I like the internet, overall. It provides a plethora of information. Some of it better than anything the MSM comes up with. One way I find it, is by multiple visits daily to Irish's blog, The Feral Irishman. Not so much for the content, as for the blogroll over on the right. It's a Who's Who and What's What of what's going on, updated several times daily, apparently whenever Irish feels like hitting "Refresh". One of the sites there, and a fairly frequent (though probably not daily) visit is Brock Townsend's blogshop over at Free North Carolina. (I confess I can't tell if he's reporting NC's current status, or demanding it. But I digress.) Because he has far-ranging sense of history, particularly local, unique and interesting insights, and a facility for expressing same.

Today, however, I noticed the following post header there:

So I clicked on over.
You can too, if you like.

TL;DR: Well, no, actually, they're not doing any such thing.

It turns out the county coroner in Podunk, er, Grand County, is all kerfluffled because two people who died of terminal lead poisoning from personal weaponry, also turned out to test positive for the Kung Flu virus.

Which she reported to the CDC, who classified them as a "death with COVID-19" (which they both were), but not as a "death from COVID-19". This got her to hyperventilating, because besides being factually true, exactly as she admits in the very TV news report linked, She's worried that putting two additional people reported as dead with COVID (which, we repeat, they undeniably were) in that county might put tourists off visiting, or somesuch. (Apparently folks out thataway are fine with two homicides from gunshots, but a coronavirus infection that had no impact on their demise whatsoever would scare the hell out of folks all over the Rockies. We confess we did not know Colorodans to be so wussified, but we defer to her expertise as a 40-year resident of the area.)

















Nonetheless, we performed a wee few additional mouseclicks, to obtain that curious thing that the late great Paul Harvey used to call "The rest of the story".

We repeat also that we love the internet, because Mirable dictu! it was no harder to find than our post's title might have foreshadowed, ever so subtlely.

We shared our findings with the bloghost.

FWIW:
1) COVID is being listed as present at death, not cause of death, in the named cases. There's nothing suspicious about that, since County Coroner Brenda Bock admits that to be factually true, in the TV news interview.

2) There is zero evidence that the CDC is adding the cases to the list of overall COVID deaths, anywhere. (Contrary to the OP title, not to put too fine a point on it.) If they were doing that, there would be no need whatsoever for the separate categories, would there?

3) Brenda Bock has no M.D. appended after her title, which set my spidey sense atingle. And lo and behold, Brenda Bock isn't a pathologist. In fact, she isn't even a physician of any type. There is no listing of her holding any sort of professional license of any type from the State of Colorado's online database. (Have I mentioned that I love the internet?)

4) In fact, from the bio before her last election run, her only medical qualification in any medical capacity was as an EMT (a whole 110 hours of training at the 13th grade level, i.e. only slightly higher than that given in Red Cross Advanced First Aid) in which capacity she last functioned in prior to 1995, a mere 25 years ago. She's mainly been a county volunteer, then part-time, later full time, deputy coroner. Before getting a mail order certificate for a job she'd been on for 7 years, and which she received 18 years ago. In a county with a tad more than 14,000 residents, total. (In Texas, they call 14,000 a middle school crowd for a football game. On a school night. In NYFC, they call 14,000 people 1 city block.) In short, she's a well-meaning amateur, whose medical expertise barely crests above "stayed in a Holiday Inn Express once". If there's a veterinarian in that town, that person outranks her in terms of medical training. In fact, if there's even a retired paramedic in that town, that person has 20 times the medical training that Bock, the county coroner, has.

In summation, it was a slow news day at the BFColorado branch of SeeBS Snooze, so they decided to throw an M-80 in the outhouse, just to watch the feces fly.

So consider the source of the story, then Google up Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.

The entire story is a non-event, from a non-entity, who's grossly under-qualified for even the job she holds, and speaking about things far beyond her ken.

She reminds me of nothing so much as doddering Aunt Clara from Bewitched, except Bock isn't acting.




What credence one should therefore place in her concerns is probably something too small to be measured with existing instrumentation. Any geezer at the general store who's had a sick cat is probably better informed, medically, than that county coroner.

I have no doubt that at some, or perhaps even many, times and places, people have pooch-screwed the COVID statistics, accidentally and/or deliberately. With 300,000 such examples, such is nigh inevitable.

This incident however, is manifestly not one of those times. And theoretically, Bock, as the County Coroner, the person who actually fills in the cause of death on the death certificates, should have known that from about the first second before she opened her mouth.

"These aren't the droids you're looking for. Move along."

Maybe they didn't cover that in mail order death investigator school, or else she may have been sick that day. There's no way of knowing.

UPDATE:
The stupidity above has taken on a life of its own: here and here. And now here.

"A Lie gets halfway around the world before the Truth has gotten its boots on." - Winston Churchill

8 comments:

Bear Claw Chris Lapp said...

Aesop Colorado is somewhat like California as there are a lot of transients relocated there. They try to hide it with that "native" bumpersticker. A friend in college had a knockoff but it said Alien instead. I laughed my ass off every time I saw it.

Peter B said...

Maybe said coroner is still operating off of old news like this from early April:

"Dr. Deborah Birx, the response coordinator for the White House coronavirus task force, said the federal government is continuing to count the suspected COVID-19 deaths, despite other nations doing the opposite.

"'There are other countries that if you had a pre-existing condition, and let's say the virus caused you to go to the ICU [intensive care unit] and then have a heart or kidney problem,' she said during a Tuesday news briefing at the White House. 'Some countries are recording that as a heart issue or a kidney issue and not a COVID-19 death.

"'The intent is ... if someone dies with COVID-19 we are counting that,' she added."

ruralcounsel said...

2) There is zero evidence that the CDC is adding the cases to the list of overall COVID deaths, anywhere. (Contrary to the OP title, not to put too fine a point on it.) If they were doing that, there would be no need whatsoever for the separate categories, would there?

You are assuming a level of logic and competency from the CDC not usually shown. If you want to dig for "the rest of the story," might I suggest you don't stop just when it appears to fit your confirmation bias?

Borepatch said...

Of what use is a category "Dead *with* Covid"?

Excuse me for being suspicious, but like the Florida kid who died in a motorcycle accident with covid, what is happening to the reported death totals? Maybe TPTB are not driven by a political agenda. Maybe ...

SlowWalker said...

Thanks! I value your informed opinions....

Aesop said...

@ruralcounsel,

Overruled, counselor. Assumes facts not in evidence. I assume no such competency from the CDC, as the only thing FedGov does reflexively is fuck up even before they get their boots on each day. Now, bring forth a story from a bona fide CDC whistleblower saying, point blank, that two shooting deaths in Colorado were put in the COVID death toll, and show all work, and the story has a factual basis.
This non-story is aught but a baby playing with a live hand grenade, reported by a media you already know is lying their ass off as soon as they wake up each and every day, for the last 70 years, and who actually assigns causes of death in her two-horse county, thus should have actually known better than to shoot her mouth off. Case dismissed.

And as for your parting shot, I have no such confirmation bias. I investigated because I thought the story was true, but within 30 seconds of looking deeper, it turned out to be total horseshit, based on the most risible series of dung piles.

@ Borepatch,
See above. I hold no brief for assuming competency nor lack of an axe to grind amidst the CDC, from janitor to whatever dogcatcher they put in charge last week. Point to actual evidence of actual perfidy, and I'll be only too happy to cover that, too. But based on this incident, I am now highly suspicious of the alleged "facts" in the motorcycle death case burped out last spring. It now seems equally likely that that was another case like this, where people assumed A, without noticing that they'd found Z.

The category "dead with COVID', as distinct for "dead of COVID" is useful for exactly the host of reasons shown by this story: to denote that a whole lot of people may have COVID (perhaps even entirely asymptomatically), and that thus every death in N.America since January 30th is not being caused by Chinese bat pox.

A) Your chest x-ray shows ground glass consolidation bilaterally, and you died from cardio-respiratory failure after a struggle of hours to days? Dead from COVID.

B) The CXR shows no such thing, but rather you died because of two large lead pellets in your heart's left atrium, with the accompanying exsanguination, but you nonetheless had the virus in your system? Dead with COVID.

Easy peasey.

I'm but a lowly RN, with only 40 times the medical qualifications and more hands-on experience (just no handy mail order certificate in "death investigation) as the county coroner in Pigknuckle, CO, yet I can see that from 1000 miles away, in about a minute.

QED

Even the CDC could stumble over that obvious reality, even if the likelihood is that they afterwards pick themselves up, and wander off back into the weeds and Swamp Of Stupid anyway, out of sheer force of habit.

Like I said, bring me something that shows that, and you've got a case.

This ain't it.

Irish said...

Aesop, I'm glad you enjoy the side bar buffet. There are lots of good bloggers and tons of information. Granted not all of it is accurate but at least it gets out there for people to verify. Way more than the MSM.

Aesop said...

Which is how it oughta be, Irish, and why I like it.

I just wish folks would do a tiny bit more digging before they published everything they do.
(The tip off here should have been the source: SeeBS.)
I'm not asking for layers and layers of editors. Just a smidgen of due diligence.