The Curious Case of Unaccounted Corpses

For our first clue, we investigate actuarial tables, which are utilized by accountants and data analysts to provide relevant data on virtually any subject. The tables are used to provide projections, based on past performance, about future behavior. Actuarial tables are used extensively in insurance to forecast, for example, how many people will be diagnosed with cancer in a given year, or how many Renault Zoes will be stolen. They then apply the actuarial data to set premiums using formulas based on the Saint Petersburg Paradox, where you wager a certain amount now (your premium), to obtain a future utility based on the outcome of an event (e.g., your Zoe getting stolen).

Actuarial tables also track for more morbid things, like how many people die each year. One of the more prestigious actuarial companies is IndexMundi, who maintain a “Deaths Clock.” For example, if you visited their site today, February 17, 2022, you would learn that 5,927 Americas have died so far this year (as of 6:20 pm MST). Because money is involved in their utilization, you can count of actuarial tables to truthfully portray data – at least to the extent that their sources can be trusted.

According to actuarial analysis, 2,854,838 Americans died from something in 2019. They obtained this death data from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The number one cause of death was heart disease, followed by stroke. The average year-to-year death rate increase from 2014 to 2019, is 1.65% (see table below). That means at the start of 2020, before COVID was a thing, one actuarial projection would be that around 2,901,480 Americans would die from something in 2020. Projections will vary based on the mathematical methods utilized. My example using an average rate increase is probably the simplest (i.e., linear projection). There are certainly more sophisticated methods involving complex functions, but sometimes the simplest solution is sufficient.

At the end of 2020, after COVID ran rampant for ten months, the linear actuarial estimate was not far off according to the CDC as 2,913,144 Americans died. This makes the error rate 0.4% or 11,964 off, which in the world of probability and statistics is pretty much spot on. 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 and locked up 322M healthy Americans. Meanwhile, notice that in 2015 the year-to-year increase was 3.18% and yet, no one was forced to wear a face mask. In 2017 the increase was 2.5% and not a single small business was forced to shut down to consolidate wealth into corporation retail who remained open. It should be noted that this reported number of American deaths in 2020, was provided by the CDC on December 31, 2020. You will want to retain this vital piece of information (i.e., clue), as we continue our investigation.

Here’s where our story incurs what mystery writers call a plot twist, sometime in 2021, the highly trusted (sic) CDC covertly revised their 2020 death count upward to 3,358,814, which is an increase of 445,670 over what they reported at the end of the year. It is not uncommon for government numbers to be revised, in fact it happens every month, with labor projections. However, under-counted something as important and easy to track as deaths by almost 450,000, is rather breathtaking.

There are several potential causal factors for why this revised number could be suspect. First, the CDC has a long history of fabricating facts, for example, they recently admitted that 90.2% of reported COVID deaths were actually caused by something else. Also, in cooperation with governors from New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Colorado, (insert blue state here), etc., they intentionally over-counted COVID deaths, some states by as much as 50%. If that’s not enough to convince you, the CDC overstated the number of Americans who have been vaccinated by millions and this is an incredibly easy number to track since every vaccination was carefully logged into a government surveillance database. Their duplicity is not limited to the COVID crisis, the CDC also over reported the number Ebola deaths during Africa’s last pandemic. And those are just to name a view. Long story short, we have no basis for believing CDC reported numbers on virtually anything, especially when a political agenda is at stake or a mistake needs to be covered up.

DOD Coverup: Most Americans recognize that the government is not above flat-out manipulating data to fit an agenda or coverup mistakes. This past January for example, during a US Senate hearing, it was revealed that DOD epidemiological data was intentionally modified to obscure the damaging side effects of the COVID non-vaccine vaccine. Medical whistleblowers came forward to disclose deliberate efforts by the DOD to inflate previous years incidents of sickness and illness in order to make the 2021 data appear statistically normal. What was revealed during this hearing is that from 2016 to 2020, the average number of diseases and injuries reported per year was 2,045,556. In 2021, however, the year of the forced jab, the rate increased to 21,512,583, which represents an increase of 1,053%. Noted increases in vaccine side effects included a 279% increase in miscarriages, 155% increase in birth defects, 350% increase in male infertility, etc. These whistleblower allegations were backed up with hard evidence which the DOD has attempted to coverup.

So, at this point in our story we have a discrepancy of 445,670 deaths between what the government reported at the end of 2020 and what they revised it to sometime in 2021. At the same time, we have ample evidence of the government’s propensity for misrepresenting data to fit their agenda or to coverup mistakes. So how can we resolve this discrepancy to get at the truth? You are probably pondering,

“Isn’t there some definitive way to filter through government lies, fabrications, and misinformation to get at the truth?”

I’m glad you asked because I have in fact found a way based on applying the age-old adage, “follow the money.” If you’ve been duly noting the clues left like breadcrumbs in the forest, you won’t have to go back and review like the rest of the class before we jump headfirst into the mathematics of causation and correlation to reveal the truth buried deep in this mystery (no pun intended). There are two truths about money that always hold, one of course is money can’t buy happiness (even though it can fund a pretty good time). Second, money always tells the truth so long as you ask the right questions. We pose our question to the monetary oracle of truth in the form of a hypothesis,

HYPOTHESIS 1: “When someone dies, their body is dispositioned.”

Seems obvious, right? When someone dies their body goes to a funeral home where they are placed in a casket, even if the ultimate disposition is cremation. This means casket manufacturers and funeral home operators would realize a sudden surge in revenue should, for example, a pandemic suddenly causes 445,670 unanticipated deaths.

Casket manufactures and funeral home operators rely on actuarial tables to make business decisions and revenue projections. For example, 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 raw material would be made. If an unexpected surge occurred, say due to a pandemic, one of two outcomes would result, 1) demand for caskets and funerals would go unmet, or 2) revenues would sharply exceed expectations.

Which of these two outcomes do you supposed happened in 2020? Before you answer, I should mention, there potentially exists a third possible outcome. Now that we are well into 2022, we have the advantage of answering this riddle with actuarial data, so, to use an old mathematical expression, let’s run the numbers.

The Caskets of Batesville: A preeminent casket manufacturer in America is the Batesville Casket Company. According to their sales and revenue reports, which are required by law to be truthful and accurate, casket revenues failed to meet market projections in 2020 and 2021 (see figure below).

How is this possible, is it even possible? How can there have been 445,670 unanticipated deaths in 2020, according to CDC revised numbers, while casket revenues failed to even meet preCOVID projections – keep in mind there are three possible answers. To resolve this discrepancy, let’s look closer at the data. The table below shows that between 2017 and 2019, the Batesville Casket Company made on average $199.03 in revenue per death (this accounts for market share adjustments). We can therefore estimate expected 2020 revenue based on the two CDC reported numbers to see which one more closely matches the baseline (i.e., truthful) expectation.

The average revenue from casket sales from 2017 to 2019 was $548,666,667 per year. For calendar year 2020, the Batesville Casket Company reported revenues of $553M, which represents an increase of 0.78%. Based on the average revenue per death, in 2020 the Batesville Casket Company serviced a demand of 2,857,636 American deaths. This suggests that of the 3,358,814 Americans the CDC claims died in 2020, 501,178 were not provided caskets. FYI, even when someone is being cremated, they must buy a casket.

Raise your hand if you remember the 2020 wall-to-wall 24/7 CNN coverage of the growing casket shortage scandal that earned the Cuomo/Lemon dual an Emmy. How many of you remember the numerous times Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Nancy Pelosi held press conferences to denounce President Trump for the horrible way in which victims of COVID were being denied a proper burial? The fact that there was in fact no such scandal is your next clue.

I get that this is a lot of math and that numbers are flying around like pancakes at a cowboy breakfast, but we’re immersed in scientific inquiry and don’t have the luxury of simply going with our feelings like Hollywood elites or placing ourselves in populace positions like politicians. No, we have to dig deep into the evidence and do the hard work necessary to un-bury the truth.

If you doubt my casket conclusion, lets come at this from a different angle. Based on our hypothesis, if a person dies, they go to a funeral home, regardless of if they are being buried or cremated. So, if X people die in a given year, then X funerals are performed. In terms of causation, a person dying causes a casket to be sold and funeral to be held. With respect to correlation, we’d expect a 1:1 correlation between casket company and funeral home revenues. If you disagree with this logical assertion, the liberal arts department is holding auditions down the hall for their avant-garde production of Alice in Wonderland.

Front Line Funeral Homes: We next investigate funeral home revenues and see what kind of correlation we get with casket company revenues. Check your socks before we start because if we get a 1:1 correlation, we are going to blow those bad boys clean off. We start by reviewing the table below, which shows revenue from funeral home services from 2008 to 2020. Again, keep in mind that unlike the government, business are required by law to report truthful and accurate information. The red line shows a linear approximation to the rate of revenue growth over this time. The first thing to notice is that based on a 13-year growth rate, funeral home revenues failed to meet expectations in 2020, just as casket company revenues fell short.

There are 19,322 funeral homes in America facilitating on average, 3 funerals per week. In 2019, revenues were $15.302B which equates to $5,361 in revenue per funeral, with 42% of funerals ending in cremation. The figure below 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, the three estimates we are currently evaluating are calculated. Notice that the estimate based on 2020 casket company revenue most closely aligns with the previous year’s earnings per death numbers. Also notice that the revenue growth between 2019 and 2020 was 0.73%.

This is the part where you’ll want to hang on to your socks. If we are to believe the revised CDC number, then the year-to-year increase in American deaths between 2019 and 2020 (year of the COVID), was 15%. However, the increase in casket revenue was only 0.78% and the increase in funeral home revenue was only 0.73%. If the CDC reported number of deaths in 2020 were accurate, it would demonstrate a weak causal link between deaths and revenues for both the casket and funeral home industries. At the same time, there is a convincingly strong correlation between the year-to-year increase in casket and funeral home revenues between 2019 and 2020.

What’s going on? If our hypothesis is correct, that “When someone dies, their body is dispositioned,” how is it possible there was a 15% increase in deaths in 2020 but a less than a 1% increase in casket and funeral home revenues? Something is not adding up. Recall earlier I stated that if an unexpected surge occurred in American deaths, say due to a pandemic, one of two outcomes would occur, either 1) demand for caskets and funerals would not be met, or 2) revenues would sharply exceed expectations. Since there was no reported shortages of caskets and no backlog of funerals, we can conclude outcome (1) did not occur. Since revenues for the casket and funeral home industries fell below projections and clearly did not match the reported surge in American deaths, we can also conclude that outcome (2) did not occur.

There exists, only one other option for our hypothesis to remain valid, the revised CDC number of deaths in 2020 is wrong. But how can this be you ask; the CDC is a trusted government agency who would never fabricate numbers. Well, based on past performance, that is exactly what the CDC has a history of doing and appears to have done once again, with what is perhaps the most import set of data in modern American history. It is as scandalous as it is sickening.

This then begs the question, what is the likely estimate for the number of Americans who died in 2020 from something, including COVID, and whose estimate should we trust? As mentioned earlier, the CDC has long and disreputable track record of fabricating numbers to fit an agenda or disguise undesirable results, so I for one do not trust anything they report. I also tend to trust money since money never lies, obfuscates, or has an agenda. From two sources that are required by law (unlike the CDC) to tell the truth, we have almost identical results, namely that there was a 0.73% to 0.78% increase in American deaths in 2020 over 2019. This would mean that a reasonable approximation to the number of Americans who died in 2020 is 2,875,934, or an increase of 21,551.

While this may seem like an unbelievably low number given all the government and media sensationalism we’ve endured these past two years, keep in mind that you have been conditioned to believe that millions of Americans died from COVID in addition to the millions of Americans who died from everything else. It is also worth noting that at the beginning of 2020, IndexMundi projected that 2,901,480 Americans would die by the end of the year and that for most of 2020, their Deaths Clock was tracking precisely to their projection as shown in the table below even as COVID raged.

This also shows that it is likely 25,546 fewer Americans died in 2020 from all causes than was projected before COVID became a thing, which will be a hard thing for most of you to come to terms with because you are so heavily invested in COVID hysteria. There are however, extenuating circumstances that make this possible, for example, during 2020, elective surgeries were interrupted, which means the annual average 440,000 doctor caused deaths were reduced. Also, because of lockdowns and quarantines, murders and accidental deaths were down.

Answering the why? Why would the CDC misreport the number of Americans who died in 2020? Why would the IndexMundi Deaths Clock track precisely to projection throughout the year while politicians and the media hyped us into a state of hysteria? Was there possibly something going on late in the year that would determine the fate of the nation, say something in November? One can imagine other motivations as well, for example, ask yourself how many billions the medical profession and BigPharma made off COVID, and by extension how many millions flowed into Washington, and “the Big Guy’s,” coffers. But that’s all conspiratorial speculation and we trying to stay within the realm of mathematical facts.

Conclusion: Could it be that the CDC is simply that incompetent, after all, there is plenty of evidence to support that conjecture? Another possible explanation is that the CDC double counted people who died from COVID with those having died with COVID. FYI, they have already confessed to commingling these two demographics. There is no way the government ever comes clean on this, and the medical profession did such a fowl job reporting deaths because hospitals collected $40k each time they reported a COVID death and doctors collected $9k per COVID death that their data is immorally meaningless. What we can do, however, is count caskets and funerals and by those numbers, there were 501,178 unaccounted for corpses in 2020. Where are they? I mean you don’t just misplace a half a million corpses without someone noticing. . . unless, they never existed in the first place.