[grumpyautist]

Prior to April 2020 the diagnostic criteria for a covid death required 0 testing whatsoever. Combine that with financial incentives to record something as covid, and the lack of other income for hospitals as patients wouldn't come for minor things and elective operations were cancelled and you have a perfect storm for bad data

[whimsicalism]

Not going to keep arguing about this, but there are a huge number of different ways we can confirm that our counts are roughly accurate.

There are obvious signals in total excess death counts indicating the number of deaths due to covid, we can do retrospective random testing of early classified covid deaths.

There is no evidence of some systematic conspiracy or anything of the sort. I encourage you to consider that you might be engaging in motivated reasoning.

[andreilys]

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

It’s simply incentives, it doesn’t take a top-down conspiracy to have independent actors try to game a system in order to profit financially.

[grumpyautist]

How can you retrospectively test the people who died prior to April? How can you confirm any of the data that was generated by guesswork?

I'm fairly sure there is no tissue available to test from any of those bodies

The situation was ripe for fraud, and there is no way to prove it didn't happen en masse. Human nature suggests it did happen. The evidence of what caused those deaths is destroyed shortly after the paperwork is filled out. The whole thing is set up in such a manner that suggests inflation of the numbers, and to have no way to counter the claims as all evidence is gone

[allturtles]

The vast majority of deaths happened after April 2020, so even if those were all made up, it wouldn't affect the overall count much.

[xkjkls]

You do realize that 95% of COVID deaths have occured after April 2020, right?