You will have already seen the headline: N.Y.C. Death Toll Soars Past 10,000 in Revised Virus Count.

The city has added more than 3,700 additional people who were presumed to have died of the coronavirus but had never tested positive… The new figures, released by the city’s Health Department, drove up the number of people killed in New York City to more than 10,000, and appeared to increase the overall United States death count by 17 percent to more than 26,000.

This happened right after our last update. They’re trying it in Europe, too. They don’t in the NYT article give a solid justification for this maneuver, except to say this:

“What New Yorkers are interested in, and what the country is interested in, is that we have an accurate and complete count,” Dr. Barbot added. “It’s part of the healing process that we’re going to have to go through.”

When I am emperor, I will ban the use and publication of “healing process”. Skip it.

The naive model, which is of the reporting process, we’ve been using can’t, of course, see mid-stream re-definitions of the reporting process. Especially one as suspicious as this.

If they’re going to say everybody who dies does so of coronavirus, well, it will be one way to bring the reported counts in line with model projections. They can then say the models were right, and that our well designed PANIC! PANIC! PANIC! strategy was fully justified.

I’ll remind us of this re-definition when we re-do the model. Obviously the totals will now be higher. But, as I’ve said ten thousand times, we model the reporting of deaths not actual deaths.

How can we sort this out? We can’t. Just like the flu, the best we’ll be able to do is look at the count of all deaths from all causes, and see how big a spike we got this late winter/early spring compared to other years.

They can juice the coronavirus death totals, but I don’t think they’d do the same to the all-deaths counts. I mean, they can say a million more died in March than actually died, but somebody’s going to go looking for the bodies and discover they’re not there.

CDC reports the all-death totals, which I highlighted two updates ago. Problem is they’re always at least a month behind on these things. Even in the best case, we can’t get estimates of “excess deaths” until end of May. Maybe even later if people realize how politically damaging these numbers are likely to be.

Maybe I’m too cynical, but if the numbers are really bad—by which I mean excess deaths are like a bad flu year—then there might be announced “difficulties” in collecting data, and that, sadly, numbers won’t be available. I doubt this will happen. But it might.

Much more likely is that they will say, whatever the totals are, “Our lockdowns saved lives!”

They’ll never be able to explain why the lockdowns were necessary here and weren’t in other countries, like Taiwan, that did better. These other countries and strategies just won’t be mentioned.

Or, if they are, look for somebody with the audacity to say it was because the American PANIC! PANIC! PANIC! was also responsible for saving lives elsewhere, because fewer people traveled, people emulated the States, etc.

Another result of juicing the numbers is that the pols will be able to use them to prolong their control. Nobody will remember the juicing; it’s probably already forgotten even though only two days old. Or people will just accept the maneuver because the government loves us.

People are growing sick of it all, though. At last. Michiganders rose up, God bless them, and tooted their horns their hubristic Governor.

Whitmer looked out upon the mini-mob and said the “enemy is the virus, not each other”. She then said the protestors might have just made further lock downs necessary. She also scolded them for passing out food, or whatever.

You have to hand it to Whitmer. She’s in charge and she knows it. And she won’t stand for her deplorable charges misbehaving. So she’s going to send them to their rooms without desert. Or dinner. Or jobs.

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