America has been on a virtual martial law shutdown for months now with no end in sight, based on unreliable if not inaccurate data about the lethality of Covid-19.

This is a never-ending argument, but the number of people who died from Covid-19 now is as imprecise as it was months ago when this debate started. At the heart of the debate is whether the patient died with Covid-19 or from Covid-19.

The crucial difference was highlighted months ago when Dr. Ngozi Ezike, an internist and pediatrician serving as the director of the Illinois Department of Public Health, tried to clarify the distinction between dying with or from Covid-19. At a press conference with Illinois Gov. J. B Pritzker, she responded to a question (see video below):

I just want to be clear in terms of the definition of people dying of COVID. The definition is very simplistic. It means, at the time of death it was a COVID-positive diagnosis. That means that if you were in hospice and had already been given a few weeks to live and then you were also were found to have COVID, that would be counted as a COVID death. Technically, even if you died of clear alternate cause but you still had COVID at the time it is still listed as a COVID death. Everyone who’s listed as a COVID death doesn’t mean that that was the cause of the death but they had COVID at the time of their death. I hope that’s helpful.

Quite helpful, indeed, Doctor.

She also answered a question about how many people died from  Covid-19 who did not have another underlying condition. She said 90 percent of the deaths attributed to Covid-19 actually died with an underlying condition. The implication in the second video (below) is that only five percent of the Covid-19 deaths are due to the disease alone, and not from an underlying condition.

This shoots to hell the premise for the nation-wide shutdowns imposed by various governors and mayors. If the disease is not as fatal as advertised, how do you justify jailing people in their homes, killing millions of jobs, wrecking the education of more millions, ruining the quality of life for so many more and so forth?

To justify this bulldozing of our civil rights, martial law proponents have been trying to “clarify” Ezike’s already clear definitions. Like trying to wash your car with hogwash.

Typical is a TruthorFiction “fact check” that tried to squirm around the statement by suggesting that whatever deaths were not caused by Covid-19 were more than offset by the unknown number of times that people died without anyone knowing that they were infected with and caused by Covid-19. Even though nobody knows the number.

Really laughable.

As well meaning as epidemiologists and statisticians are, Ezike spoke the truth. Martial law was declared based on the worst possible scenarios they predicted, predictions that turned out not to just be wrong, but grossly untrue. 

Their credibility as scientists and dedicated public servants have been eroded if not ruined. And that makes the coronavirus pandemic even more destructive.