A month ago, public health apparatchiks in New York decided that nowhere near enough people were dying from Wuhan virus so they arbitrarily dumped into the dead-by-Wuhan category some 3,700 previous deaths that might have possibly, under the right circumstances and when viewed in the proper lighting conditions, be somewhat attributable to Wuhan virus in some way [see New York City Arbitrarily Declares 3,700 New Wuhan Virus Deaths That May Have Zero Connection to the Pandemic]. Since then, the CDC has basically baked the ‘by-guess-by-God’ method into Wuhan death reporting by sanctioning the attribution of deaths to Wuhan based on zero empirical evidence.

Reporting done by CWB Chicago, a neighborhood-funded public safety news outlet for Chicago’s downtown and North Side, shows how the use of Wuhan as an underlying cause of death can be used to totally juice your death totals and build a case for more government control and more government money.

Here, we have a terrible case of death by heroin overdose and Wuhan virus but mostly death by heroin overdose:

Another interesting "COVID death" from this afternoon's Cook County medical examiner ledger. #Chicago pic.twitter.com/TkNPTL290v

— CWBChicago (@CWBChicago) May 10, 2020

Here are more that fall into the questionable category but aren’t clear-cut. What we don’t know from this is the stage of the major disease, like sepsis (really, you had sepsis but Chinese Lung AIDS is what killed you?), and whether Wuhan virus was the cause of them being hospitalized or if it was simply discovered to be present.

Here are some more typical COVID cases from this evening's Cook County medical examiner ledger. #Chicago pic.twitter.com/6mhc7tVKye

— CWBChicago (@CWBChicago) May 10, 2020

Parker Molloy, who as far as I know works full time as an idiot at Media Matters but that goes without saying, tried to push back, but, in typical MMfA manner, Molloy, who wants to be referred to as she, simply didn’t bother to do any research.

Finally, @ParkerMolloy, you are wrong about how COVID deaths are counted in Illinois. This quote is from Dr. Ngozi Ezike, the head of Illinois’ Department of Public Health. Again, we're not saying the counting method is right or wrong. You, however, were wrong. pic.twitter.com/6OFwp5TIje

— CWBChicago (@CWBChicago) May 10, 2020

We're good. You may want to brush up, however. pic.twitter.com/JxYJ44Up7e

— CWBChicago (@CWBChicago) May 10, 2020

There has never been any doubt that the Wuhan deaths are being juiced because there is no one involved in the reporting of those deaths with an incentive not to juice them. In some places, the standard is more rigorous than others but a quick glance shows you where the numbers are grotesquely padded…or they point to states which have a system of health care inferior to Bangladesh. For instance, New York’s death rate from Wuhan virus (as of today) of 1,376 per million is 17 times the median death rate in the nation. In fact, there is an indication that Wuhan deaths epitomize the Ronald Reagan quote “If you want more of something, subsidize it. If you want less of something, tax it.” The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, or CARES Act provides a 20% bump in compensation to hospitals for each Wuhan virus patient they treat. When you combine this with CDC guidelines that allow for presumptive diagnosis, you have created a system that has a financial incentive in classifying as many patients as Wuhan sufferers as possible.

By allowing and encouraging this nonsense, health departments across the nation have made the number of deaths from Wuhan an irrelevant number. By calling everything death-by-Wuhan, policymakers, to the extent that they are not complicit, have been deprived of a data point that lets them measure the severity of the outbreak and progress in eliminating it. Under this system, we will never be back to ‘normal’ because it is interested bureaucrats who control what goes into the data used in making that decision. And there is no indication that they wish to give up their newfound power to govern.