As I have documented previously here, the "COVID death" statistics kept by the states and the CDC, and that are used to do nothing but instill fear of a virus with a 99% survivability rate in people to keep them under control are purposefully. For example, in the case of Rafel Cuevas from Newport, Oregon:

Amber Cuevas, sister of Rafael Cuevas, told the News-Times she and her family were somewhat surprised to see Lincoln County Public Health report the death of the man they knew to be her brother as COVID-related. The health department did tell them Rafael tested positive after he died — which also came as a surprise, she said, given how attentive he was in taking precautions — but the family had never been given a cause of death.

She said information shared by her brothers’ friends led them to believe it might have been an overdose, but she’d been denied twice when asking both the funeral home and a private doctor to arrange an autopsy, and the family is still awaiting a toxicology report. She said they were not aware of his having any underlying conditions.

“He wasn’t showing any symptoms of COVID,” she said, adding that they would definitely have been told if he was feeling ill. “He was very paranoid about COVID, so it was kind of a surprise to us when they told us he tested positive. He was very paranoid about it.”

And of course, the Oregon Health Authority gave a mealy-mouthed excuse:

Cuevas said the health department called the family after reporting the death to explain — public health uses health authority guidelines, which classify any death “within 60 days of the earliest available date among exposure to a confirmed case, onset of symptoms, or date of specimen collection for the first positive test” as COVID related. It also includes those where the death certificate lists COVID as a primary or contributing cause.

We count COVID-19 deaths this way because the virus can often have effects on an individual’s health that may complicate their recovery from other diseases and conditions, even injuries, and indirectly contribute to their death,” the OHA spokesperson said. “Another reason is because OHA is using this data to track the spread of the disease, and to create actionable steps for stopping its spread.”

Apparently the only way to track COVID infections is to treat them all as deaths.

Today comes a new example of this "COVID death" stat bloat, this time from Grand County, Colorado:

GRAND COUNTY, Colo. (CBS4) – The Grand County coroner is calling attention to the way the state health department is classifying some deaths. The coroner, Brenda Bock, says two of their five deaths related to COVID-19 were people who died of gunshot wounds.

Bock says because they tested positive for COVID-19 within the past 30 days, they were classified as “deaths among cases.”

“It’s absurd that they would even put that on there,” she said. “Would you want to go to a county that has really high death numbers? Would you want to go visit that county because they are contagious. You know I might get it, and I could die if all of a sudden one county has a high death count. We don’t have it, and we don’t need those numbers inflated.”

When somebody dies of a shotgun blast, to me it seems pretty obvious that whatever they might have had going on medically, a shotgun doesn't need any help.

And of course, the state health department gives the same, mealy-mouthed excuse as Oregon.

The state health department says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention requires them to report people who’ve died with COVID-19 in their systems because it’s crucial for public health surveillance.

Now what's interesting about Colorado, is back in May of 2020, they realized how convoluted and corrupted this method of counting "COVID deaths" was, so they changed how they kept the stats to be more accurate:

Colorado health officials on Friday changed how they count the number of people lost to the coronavirus outbreak in the state.

As a result, the state's stated COVID-19 death toll dropped by nearly 300 people who had contracted the virus but died of other causes that may or may not have been related to infection. On Thursday, Colorado reported 1,091 coronavirus deaths under its prior method. But on Friday, the state clarified that 878 people have died as a direct result of COVID-19 infection as of May 9, while another 272 had tested positive but died of other causes as of Friday.

In a Friday afternoon news conference, Rachel Herlihy, the state epidemiologist, apologized for confusion about how coronavirus deaths are counted. She said the state would begin reporting the number of deaths where COVID-19 is believed to be a contributing factor, in addition to total coronavirus case deaths, the larger number.

And the reason for making this change? Similar cases of inflated "COVID death" stats:

Colorado reported its first coronavirus death on March 13, but its method of counting coronavirus deaths as anyone who died while infected came under scrutiny Thursday when Montezuma County Coroner George Deavers disputed the state's inclusion of a May 4 death in his southwestern Colorado county among the state's death toll, 9News KUSA reported.

Deavers told 9News that the 35-year-old man did test positive for COVID-19, but blood work showed he died of "ethanol toxicity," which Deavers signed as the man's official cause of death.

So Colorado tries to give accurate stats, but the CDC still twists them to make it seem like more people are dying of COVID than really are. It's all about the fear...