From March 2020 to March 2021, the Department of Public Health classified all deaths that occurred after testing positive as “COVID”, regardless of the time between testing and death.
As reported by NBC (Boston), Massachusetts public health officials decided to adopt a new Covid death counting system, after having identified an “excessive count”.
The state has assigned, for one year, the Covid death label to all deaths, regardless of cause, as long as they had a prior positive test. The possibility of having taken the test months before death did not prevent classification.
For example, even if someone had contracted the virus in March and died in a car accident in July, it was added to the death count from the pandemic virus.
Criteria change
After a year in force, the counting system was discreetly changed in April 2021 to only consider those who died within 60 days, unless the death was clearly linked to another cause, such as trauma.
However, the administration has only now retroactively applied the new method, which has significantly altered the pandemic numbers in Massachusetts.
From the 23.708 previously considered Covid deaths, 4.081 deaths (17%) were removed, which together with the newly attributed 400, caused the number of Covid deaths in the state to drop to about 20 thousand.
The new method suggested by State Council and territorial epidemiologists requires counting deaths within 30 days of a positive test.
A similar case in England
A similar situation occurred in England where counting also included anyone who died after testing positive, even if death occurred at any time after testing and irrespective of the cause of death.
In that case, the government was forced to change the registration of death as being “by Covid” after an article by the Center for Evidence-Based Medicine (University of Oxford) denounced the situation.
