[whycombinater]

It's possible that hospitals were claiming something like a car crash victim with COVID as a COVID death for extra funding, making actual total deaths less due to COVID than reported, meaning what he said was true, even while the hospital is full of people with COVID, possibly including that very car crash victim.

Other official facts of the time period included 1. standing in a restaurant without a mask on is almost terrorism and 2. sitting at a restaurant without a mask on is fine.

[praestigiare]

Numbers of cases, deaths, and how those numbers are tabulated are factual data. We can argue over the data quality, but at this point we have data from many independent countries' health services. Our view of these facts has gotten better with time, and we now have more certainty than we did in the early days of the pandemic.

Recommendations, regulations, and responses to the pandemic as it happened are factual in the sense that they happened, but are not "facts" in the same way. It is not a fact that standing in a restaurant without a mask was terrorism and sitting was fine. Instead, given the information available at the time, and the practical requirement to have your mask off to eat, this policy was chosen for a time as a risk mitigation balanced with practical requirements. The appropriateness of this policy is a matter of opinion.

[thinkcontext]

How do you square that theory with the strong correlation with deaths and unvaccinated rate, even after controlling for age and income?