Chapter 15 in the R.M. Dolin book, “Truth and Trust in Crisis.”
“There are lies, damn lies, and statistics” – Mark Twain
We began our COVID crisis assessment trusting government predictions and treating academic projections as truthful. As a means for comprehending our suddenly terrorizing world, we applied simple mathematics to first assess if COVID was behaving as a naturally occurring virus and then to validate government and academic assertions that did not seem aligned with observations. Our analyses lead to growing concerns that the crisis was being misrepresented and sensationalized even though we couldn’t uncover why. This led us to model COVID behavior using a simple four-line spreadsheet program that proved to be consistently spot-on accurate while models used for policy and planning where consistently over predicting COVID deaths by as much as a factor of ten.
Our persistent examination of COVID data coupled with multiple models we developed to provide key elements of insight into the pandemic, led us to realize that COVID data was intentionally being corrupted to promote a national narrative. Again though, we couldn’t find a reasonable rational for why the narrative was being promoted and to what end. We compared U.S. COVID death data with both pre-COVID actuarial data and data from other countries, furthering our conclusion that U.S. COVID data was intentionally being misrepresented. We then learned that multiple government agencies, including the CDC and DOD were equally complicit in obfuscating COVID data, which diminishes our trust in any government agency to tell the truth during a crisis. We also found that medical professionals were being incentivized to misrepresent COVID death data which further diminished our trust in crisis response leaders.
We have courageously gone where the math took us, while accepting the perilous probability pundits will label us conspiracy theorists even though we even wondered if the fantastic conclusions waiting to be drawn could be possible. And with all that in our collective past, we now arrive at the most profound inquiry of the COVID crisis requiring once again creative avenues of truth and trust to untangle perhaps the most carefully conceived misdirection of the entire crisis. The challenge is finding an independent source for data that can be validated and applied to assess if recent government directed CDC reports can be trusted. For that, we turn to private sector financials, because money, unlike most other data sources, doesn’t lie, doesn’t have a narrative or agenda, and doesn’t obfuscate.
Russian dictator Joseph Stalin famously said, “It’s not the people who vote that count, it’s the people who count the votes.” When it comes to counting the number of Americas who died during COVID it matters how the dead get counted, and who’s doing the counting. For example, there’s a distinct difference between those who died from COVID and those who died with COVID. The CDC now admits that 94% of the deaths they initially attributed to COVID were likely caused by something else. This validates our earlier assertion that only the total number of deaths from all causes can be trusted as a baseline for assessing COVID’s impact.
What if in addition to the number deaths attributed to COVID being misrepresented, the number of reported deaths in 2020 from all causes is also being misrepresented? While we’ve yet to present any evidence such an assertion exists, if it did the issue becomes not only determining a way to prove it but what that would mean?
Let’s consider the assertion; we’ve previously established that the government inflated 2020 COVID death data to make the crisis seem more severe than it is by among other things conflating people who died from COVID with people who died having COVID. That means a year’s worth of death data is corrupted while we’ve proven we can’t know how people died in 2020 we have maintained that in the aggregate we at least we know how many people have died. We have no basis for this belief other than diminished trust in CDC reporting. This suggests that we need an alternative method for determining the number of people who died this year not reliant on CDC data.
The implications to determining the government’s misrepresenting 2020 death data are not only hard to imagine, but impact our nation’s entire infrastructure because actuaries depend on death data for projections in virtually every aspect of the economy. To pull off such a ruse, the government would have to obfuscate data in carefully conceived ways that deflect challenge and stymie investigation, which isn’t impossible when in control of the data. The requisite source of independent data would have to exist outside government control, a source whose truth is implicitly trusted. Imagine the arc of discovery that would result from an assessment of such data.
We have previously demonstrated that through the first nine months of 2020, the number of American’s who died from all causes, included COVID, trended below pre-COVID expectations, suggesting COVID’s impact on death rates is minimal. Somewhere though, in last three months of the year, something profound happened that caused reported death numbers to dramatically skyrocket upward at an unprecedented rate that somehow failed to penetrate a single news cycle.
Table 15.1 U.S. Death Data from 2010 Through 2021.
Table 15.1 shows the American death data from 2010 to 2021. The metric for comparing death rates across multiple years is deaths per 100,000 people, which is necessary because the population changes every year. Each year the death rate increases, which could be caused by things ranging from getting older to becoming unhealthier but it is not a good trend. In 2020, the first year of COVID, the death rate jumps 153 per 100,000 during the COVID years the rates jump significantly, which on first blush is expected due to COVID. These numbers though, don’t match the CDC death data reported at that time, which is suspicious.
In 2020, 3,389,094 people reportedly died, which is 548,363 above the pre-COVID expectation made by IndexMundi at the beginning of the year. What’s difficult to reconcile is that as we tracked COVID deaths through the first eight months of 2020, they lagged behind IndexMundi expectations but then, we are led to believe, the death rate suddenly surged in last four months from 774 deaths per day to 4,495 deaths per day, a historically unprecedented increase of 580% that went unnoticed by media and academia. Given the government, media, and medical professional hysteria we lived through the first eight months of the year, imagine the existential levels of panic we’d have seen if the death rate shot up 580%. Instead, states relaxed lockdowns and mask mandates were loosening, which defies logic.
To delve deeper into whether these numbers should be trusted, let’s approach the problem from a different, but perhaps more factual perspective. IndexMundi[1] maintains a “Deaths Clock,” providing a minute-by-minute accounting of how many people have died. Because financial institutions rely on actuarial tables for decision making, they can be counted on to truthfully portray data – at least to the extent their data sources can be trusted. According to actuarial analysis, 2,854,838 Americans died from something in 2019, and IndexMundi’s pre-COVID expectation was that 2,901,480 Americans would die in 2020.
At the end of 2020, our COVID model that has been spot-on since March, matched the CDC reported value at that time of 2,913,144 deaths[2], with an error rate 0.4%. According to the CDC end of year report, the year-to-year increase from 2019 to 2020, the first year of COVID, was 2%. We might be tempted to conclude that 2% is not that significant, but it must be since we shut down the country, locked up 322 million healthy Americans, and mandated everyone wear facemasks that don’t work. Meanwhile, notice in 2015 the year-to-year increase was 3.18%, yet no one was forced into quarantine or to wear a facemask. In 2017 the increase was 2.5% and not a single small business was shut down and no one was forced to take an untested vaccine.
Table 15.2. U.S. Death Rate Deltas with 2020 Expectation.
It’s crucially importance to note that the CDC number of American deaths in 2020 shown in Table 15.2 was reported by the CDC on December 31, 2020. However, somewhere in 2021, our journey through the mathematics of COVID incurs what mystery writers call a plot twist, as the CDC covertly revises their 2020 death count upward to 3,358,814, which is an increase of 445,670 over their published end of the year tally. It’s not uncommon for government numbers to be revised, for example, it’s a monthly occurrence in government labor reports. However, miscounting something as important and easy to assess as deaths by almost 450,000 from an agency that is counted on to accurately monitor such things, defies logic.
Several reasons exist for why we might consider the revised CDC number suspect. First, CDC has a long history of fabricating facts[3], for example, they admit that 94% of previously reported COVID deaths were caused by something else. If that’s not enough, consider that the CDC also admits to overstating the number of Americans who have been vaccinated[4] by millions, and this is an incredibly easy number to track since every vaccination is carefully tracked. As previously demonstrated, little basis exists for trusting CDC numbers on virtually anything, especially when narratives need to be supported, and political hubris concealed.
If CDC data cannot be trusted, where then do we turn for truth and trust in a crisis? At this point we have a discrepancy of 445,670 deaths between what the government reported at the end of 2020, and what they revised it to be in 2021. Meanwhile we have ample evidence of the government’s propensity for misrepresenting data to fit narratives and since government controls the data, how can this discrepancy possibly be resolved to get at the truth? There is one avenue at our disposal based on a foundational truth in life, namely, money never lies so long as you ask the right question. We pose our question to the monetary oracle of truth in the form of a hypothesis,
H2: “When someone dies, their body is dispositioned.”
To test this hypothesis, we begin with an observation; namely, when someone dies their body goes to a funeral home where they’re placed in a casket, even if cremation is the ultimate disposition. This means that if a pandemic suddenly causes 445,670 unanticipated deaths in three months, casket manufacturers and funeral home operators would experience a sudden and massive surge that would be reflected in an equivalent revenue surge.
Like most businesses, casket manufactures, and funeral home operators rely on actuarial tables to make decisions and projections. If in early 2020, actuarial indicators suggest significantly more deaths are likely in 2020 than in 2019, capacity expansions would be planned and increased investments in necessary materials would be made. If an unexpected surge occurs, say due to a pandemic, one of two outcomes result, either demand for caskets and funerals go unmet, or revenues sharply exceed expectations.
By 2022, we have the advantage of answering this riddle through the backward clairvoyance of financial data, so, let’s run the numbers. A preeminent casket manufacturer in America is the Batesville Casket Company[5]. As shown in Figure 15.1, reported revenues,[6] which are required by law to be truthful and accurate, failed to meet market projections in both 2020 and 2021.
Figure 15.1 Revenue Growth for Casket Industry from 2016 to 2021.
Table 15.3. Normalized Revenue per Death for the Batesville Casket Company.
How can there have been 445,670 unanticipated deaths in 2020, while casket revenues failed to even meet pre-COVID projections? Making market share adjustments, Table 15.3 shows that between 2017 and 2019, the Batesville Casket Company makes on average $199.03 per death. We can therefore estimate what the expected 2020 revenue would be based on both initial CDC end-of-2020 data and their subsequently adjusted numbers to see which one more closely matches marketplace realities.
The average annual revenue from casket sales from non-COVID years 2017 to 2019, was $548,666,667 per year. For 2020, the Batesville Casket Company reported revenues of $553 million, which represents an increase of 0.78%. Based on the average revenue per death, in 2020 the casket industry serviced a demand of 2,857,636 deaths. This suggests that if 3,358,814 Americans died as the CDC asserts in their revised data, 501,178 have no funeral record.
It should be noted that included in the funeral and casket numbers are those who choose cremations. In other words, these numbers are adjusted to include cremations so does not account for disparity between the number of people the CDC says died in 2020 and the number of caskets produced. Raise your hand if you remember the wall-to-wall media outrage over the great casket scandal of 2020. Keep your hand up if you also followed the compelling congressional hearings to uncover how a half million Americans could be denied a proper burial. I hope your hand was not raised because there was no media outrage and no congressional hearings. I share your concern that given the significance of the allegation being made, one data point of evidence is insufficient and additional sources of validation must be found.
Let’s address validation from a different but equally trustworthy angle. Based on our hypothesis, when someone dies they process through a funeral home, regardless of burial or cremation plans. In other words, if X people die X funerals are performed. In terms of causation, a person dying causes a casket to be sold and funeral to be held, so we expect a 1:1 correlation between casket and funeral home revenues.
If a 1:1 correlation (i.e., causality), between manufactured caskets and funerals conducted exists, we validate our trust in this data because unlike government reporting, businesses are lawfully required to truthful report financial information. Figure 15.2 shows funeral home industry revenue from 2008 to 2020. The red line is a linear approximation to the rate of revenue growth over time. Based on performance trends over 13-years, funeral home revenues failed to meet 2020 expectations, which means fewer funerals were performed in 2020 than were projected to be required pre-COVID. In other words, the data seems to suggest that COVID did not cause an increase in 2020 funerals.
Figure 15.2. Revenue Growth in the Funeral Home Industry from 2008 to 2020.
Table 15.4. Funeral Home Revenue from 2015 to 2020.
There are 19,322 funeral homes in America[7] performing on average, three funerals per week. In 2019, industry revenues were $15.302 billion, which equates to $5,361 per funeral, with 42% of funerals ending in cremation. Table 15.4 summarizes funeral home revenues from 2015 to 2020. In general, the year-to-year revenue increases are trending smaller, which is probably due to more people opting for less expensive cremations. Since there’s a discrepancy as to how many Americans died in 2020, we can use initial and revised CDC death count data along with casket industry data to estimate funeral home revenues for each scenario. Notice that of the three scenarios, the casket industry estimate most closely aligns with 2019 earnings per funeral when adjusted to the 0.73% revenue increase between 2019 and 2020.
If the revised CDC number of deaths are accurate, then the year-to-year increase in American deaths between 2019 and 2020 is 15%. However, the increase in casket revenue in this period is only 0.78%, and the increase in funeral home revenue is only 0.73%. While there’s no causal link between CDC reported deaths and revenues for either the casket or funeral home industries, the two industries have a 1:1 correlation. It seems improbable there could be a 15% increase in deaths but less than a 1% increase in casket and funeral home industry revenues.
Since there was no reported shortage of caskets or funeral backlogs in 2020, we can conclude every death in 2020 was properly serviced. Since 2020 revenues for both the casket and funeral home industries fell below pre-COVID projections, the revised CDC surge in American deaths in 2020 does not seem likely, which is not such a fantastic conclusion given the CDC’s history of misrepresenting data.
Further validation of our conclusion comes from the fact that the initially reported CDC 2020 death data strongly correlate with casket and funeral home revenues suggesting the initial CDC reported death data for 2020 is more trustworthy.
Two industries required by law to file factually accurate reports, we have almost identical outcomes, namely that the increase in American deaths in 2020 was below pre-COVID estimates, which comports to the IndexMundi actuarial data we tracked monthly throughout the year. This suggest a reasonable approximation to the number of Americans who died in 2020 is 2,875,934, or an increase of 21,551, which astonishingly tracks to the number our simple model projected way back in March.
Table 14.5. Pre-COVID Expected Deaths in 2020 versus Reported Deaths.
This seems an unbelievably low approximation given we’ve been bombarded with government, media, and medical experts telling us repeatedly that millions of Americans died from COVID. It’s worth noting that at the beginning of 2020, IndexMundi expected 2,863,859 Americans to die by the end of the year and for most of 2020, their Deaths Clock tracked closely to this expectation, as shown in the Table 15.5, even as COVID raged.
Projecting the graph in Table 15.5 out to the end of year indicates it’s likely 25,546 fewer Americans died in 2020 than was expected preCOVID, which is difficult to comprehend. There are, however, extenuating circumstances making this possible, for example, elective surgeries were interrupted in 2020, which means the expected 440,000 doctor caused deaths were reduced. Also, because of lockdowns and quarantines, murders and accidents were down. Of course, as pointed out earlier, there are also extenuating circumstances that drive the numbers up.
The unexplored question is why the CDC would misreport their 2020 death data? Why would the IndexMundi Deaths Clock track to expectation throughout the year while politicians and the media worked to convince us otherwise? Was there possibly something going on late in the year that would determine the fate of the nation, say something in the first week in November? One can speculate on other motivations as well, such as the billions/trillions medical professionals and BigPharma made from COVID.
Another possibility is that the CDC is incompetent. Perhaps they double count people who died from COVID with those having died with COVID since they’ve already admitted commingling these two demographics. But that doesn’t address why they tracked to IndexMundi all year and then much later dramatically revise their data. One thing’s certain, there’s no way government comes clean on this, and the medical profession made such a mess out of obfuscating COVID death data there’s little chance of unraveling their maleficence. What we can do is count caskets and funerals and consider that trusted data to conclude there was no COVID surge in 2020. We will leave the unresolved “why” for investigative journalists and historians.
If I still haven’t convinced you, let’s find further validation in another equally aligned business sector. In 1979 there were 1,465,828 hospital beds[8] in the U.S. but by 2022 that number dwindled to 920,531, with 13.5% (124,272) ICU beds[9]. During this time the hospital industry transitioned from primarily nonprofit community-based hospitals to for-profit corporate conglomerates. Privatization drives optimization so to maximize efficiency, fewer beds in hospitals running near capacity became the operational goal.
In June of 2021, hospitals average 12,041 COVID patients, or 1.3% of capacity and their COVID death rate is 1.25%. The peak of COVID hospitalizations occurs in January 2022, when 145,000 COVID patients[10] are hospitalized, representing 15.7% of hospital bed capacity, mostly from patients not requiring ICU care. If 12,041 patients are hospitalized per week in 2020 and the death rate reported by CDC is 1.7% of those infected, the year-end expected number of deaths would be 10,644. The CDC initially reports 972,000 people died from COVID in 2020 and 2021, but then in 2022, quietly revises the number down to 58,320, or 29,160 per year. This equates to 32,986 COVID hospitalizations per week, which is more than the hospital industry reports.
If the revised CDC 2020 death count combined with 445,670 more deaths than expected due to COVID are true, this equates to 504,151 COVID hospitalizations per week, or 55% of hospital capacity. However, the peak COVID hospitalization is only 145,000 per week, and that’s only sustained for one week in 2022. In other words, U.S. hospitalization rates do not support the revised CDC death data but do comport to initial CDC end of year reported data. Our analysis of hospitalization data confirms the results of our casket and funeral industry analysis, which is that the initial CDC death data in 2020 is likely correct and COVID did not result in millions of Americans dying from the virus.
[1] United States Deaths Clock – IndexMundi
[2] TOTAL US DEATHS 2014,2015,2016,2017,2018,2019 & 2020 (myessentialnews.com)
[3] Press Release (wordpress.com)
[4] Report: CDC overcounts millions of vaccinations (yahoo.com)
[5] Batesville | Batesville Casket Company
[6] 2022 Burial Casket Manufacturing Industry Statistics & Market Research Report – AnythingResearch
[7] 37 Funeral Industry Statistics and Trends – BrandonGaille.com
[8] Hospital beds number U.S. 1975-2019 | Statista
[9] How Many ICU Beds Does A Hospital Need? – The Hospital Medical Director
[10] Number of COVID patients in US hospitals reaches record low | Fox News
