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:

In Colorado, They're Counting Gun Shot Fatalities as COVID Deaths

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?)

CO Professional License Lookup

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