How many COVID deaths are actual deaths from COVID?

Fake news, you say?

Nope.

From CDC's own database (we have a locally archived data file of this, and the Web archive has copies too):

Hmmmm... It's almost as if New Yorkers got very lucky in March and April — all their usual causes of death suddenly dropped by 80%!

Or, perhaps, they might just have reported normal causes of death as COVID deaths, inflating the gravity of the situation, and terrorizing you in the process.  Did you know that, in a Colorado county, 40% of the COVID deaths they reported, had gunshot wounds?

Who knows!  Right?  It's not like there's an economic incentive to nudge people into reporting a death as a COVID death...

...oh.

Perhaps you say "but it is true that COVID deaths replace some of the deaths that would have occurred from other causes".

Yes, it is true.  Some.

Did it replace all the deaths you see graphed above?

No.  Clearly not.  People dying in highway pileups or shootouts, tragic as it may be, did not die from COVID.  No one is stupid enough to believe that.

But even if COVID had killed everyone who was going to die of car accidents, gunshot wounds, cancer, and other causes of death, the excess mortality — the actual number we care about — is much smaller than the raw COVID death count.

So when CDC and news media incessantly and relentlessly report "COVID deaths", they are actually deceiving the public — via selective emphasis of only certain facts, and omission of other relevant facts.

It is one thing to say "we have had 4 thousand excess deaths this month because of COVID", and an altogether different thing to say "we have had 16 thousand deaths this month from COVID".  The first statement casts a factually correct situation that clearly demands some urgency.  The second statement is four times more dramatic, while artfully hiding the (often non-obvious) fact that a solid majority of these deaths were simply inevitable due to other causes.  In short — the second statement disingenuously amplifies the panic surrounding COVID by implicitly and falsely imputing to COVID many times more deaths that any honest person would recognize as legitimate consequences of COVID.

What do CDC and news media emphasize in their incessant, never-ending, alarmist reports?  They nearly always emphasize the terror-inducing statement that conveys less truth while causing more fear.

The purpose of the thing is what it does.  Does what they do look to you like informing neutrally, or like terrorizing?  You can infer the purpose of their actions by what they do.

Is death the only thing being inflated and conflated?

Nope.  It isn't just deaths.  Hospitalizations are also being dishonestly reported.  Here's a chart (source, data) of COVID vs. non-COVID hospitalizations in London, for the past 3 months:

Isn't that fairly interesting?  Occupancy is fairly steady.  What grows and reduces are the numbers of COVID vs. non-COVID cases.

So how do they report hospital occupancy rate?  They nearly always report it using the terrorizing framing of "oh no, we are at 90+%!"... even though high occupancy rate is actually fairly normal — any lower would mean they are quite literally wasting money on unoccupied hospital beds, unused power / capacity, and idle personnel.

I must insist: if someone chooses to frame a situation in the absolute worst possible way, and deceive you about relevant facts (like the habitual occupancy rate) to amplify the terror that the reports induce, they are deceiving you.

Do you want to know more?

If so, we have an archive of a Johns Hopkins newsletter article which questions the official narrative (the Internet Archive also has it).

You won't find this in the Johns Hopkins Web site anymore — they retracted the newsletter article.  They openly admit they've squelched the article, in the page now squatting where the article used to live:

Editor’s Note: After The News-Letter published this article on Nov. 22, it was brought to our attention that our coverage of Genevieve Briand’s presentation “COVID-19 Deaths: A Look at U.S. Data” has been used to support dangerous inaccuracies that minimize the impact of the pandemic.

They now claim there were "inaccuracies" in the article, citing CDC data as proof of those inaccuracies.  The exact same data I used above.  Scroll up to see how wonderful that CDC data is.

I think what happened there is simple to figure out.  The author of the article accidentally questioned the narrative in Johns Hopkins' Web site.  The students running the site panicked, then promptly reversed course to stamp out the truth, and to discredit the author.  Note the artful verbiage: "minimize the impact of the pandemic".  Can't have any fact sharing among ourselves — pesky facts must not be allowed to minimize the portentous effort made to inflate the panic!

The lesson is clear: if facts lead people to question the narrative, then facts must be erased.