Last month, TFTP reported on the county of Alamada, California and their bombshell admission that 25% of all deaths attributed to COVID-19 were “clearly not caused by the virus” at all. We predicted that this was just the tip of the iceberg — and it appears that it was. Now, another county in California, Santa Clara, has followed suit.

Last week, officials in Santa Clara County admitted that they have been adding anyone who died with COVID-19 to the death toll regardless of whether or not the virus actually caused their death. Now, however, they have reduced their official count by 22% after going back through and removing those who died from other causes.

As the Mercury news reported, “even if a county resident had cancer or was hit by a car but tested positive when receiving medical care or after being pronounced dead, he or she was added to the county’s tally.”

“It is important to go back and do this accounting to see if COVID was actually the cause of death,” said University of California San Francisco Prof. of Medicine and Infectious Disease expert Dr. Monica Gandhi. “I think that transparent communication is an upside, I mean, in the sense that it’s true that if we did this across the nation, it would bring our death rate lower. A downside of that, could be that people will say, ‘Well, it wasn’t as serious as you said.’”

But that is exactly what it means. If the death toll is significantly lower than we were led to believe, it actually was not as serious as the “experts” said.

“In the midst of everything COVID people were sort of putting down that cause of death as COVID,” Gandhi said. “It is important to go back and do this accounting to see if COVID was actually the cause of death.”

Indeed it is important and this was stressed by many as the COVID death toll surged.

Dr. Sarah Rudman, the county’s assistant public health officer, told the Mercury News that the original process—during the height of the surge—”was the right decision at the time.”

“There were a number of reasons that our process in the height of the surge was the right decision for the time: The high numbers of deaths coming in, the lag in receiving information about why or how someone might have died, and the need to get real time information to the public to help people understand how to stay safe,” Rudman said Friday. “Now we’re able to do that deep review of the death certificates to make those detailed assessments.”

As TFTP reported in March, similar findings came out of Illinois. Monroe County Coroner Bob Hill made waves in his home state of Illinois after he examined a portion of the list of possible COVID-19 deaths. What he found was utterly shocking and has led to calls for an audit of COVID-19 deaths in his state.

According to the Center Square, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention listed 19,893 deaths through the end of February in Illinois where COVID-19 was listed among multiple causes. Of those deaths, about 1,830, or 9.2%, had COVID-19 listed as the sole cause of death.

The other 90 percent had other factors that attributed to their deaths.

Many skeptics of the recent decreases in COVID-19 death counts claim that the increase in excess deaths in 2020 show something was amiss. However, a recent report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, PNAS, pointed out that in relation to previous years, there was not a major surge in excess deaths at all. In fact, according to the report, 2017 was worse.

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