One of the pre-eminent points of confusion - and abuse - in the current "COVID emergency" in Oregon is the counting of deaths and marking them as being caused by COVID19. There have been many documented examples of OHA recording deaths as COVID deaths when they were only tangentially related at all to COVID. This becomes a problem because Kate Brown and OHA use those statistics as a justfiction for the continuing two month. never ending extensions of her "emergency powers" authority, under which she makes her mask mandates, and arbitrarily selects businesses to close down for weeks at a time.

There have been multiple examples in the local media of families asking why their loved ones were counted as COVID deaths, when in reality they had nothing to do with COVID. The most recent example comes from Newport, as reported by the News Times:

On Wednesday, the health authority included in its daily report the death of a 27-year-old Lincoln County man, who it said died Nov. 17 and tested positive for COVID-19 the next day. The report said the man had underlying conditions.

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.”

Now where it gets interesting is the OHA's excuse for counting this as a COVID death.

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.

The health authority did not respond to the News-Times inquiry asking whether a death from overdose would be listed as COVID-related if the person tested positive, or if an overdose would be described as an “underlying condition.” A health authority spokesman told Portland’s KGW News in August that a COVID-positive individual who died in a motorcycle crash would be counted as a COVID-related death.

“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.”

So in other words, if you died of any cause within 60 days of possibly being infected, they count is as a COVID death. This is in spite of the fact that the incubation period for COVID is only 14 days.

However, their excuse for categorizing a motorcycle death for the purposes of being able to track the spread of the disease falls flat. If all you want to do is track the spread of the disease, why not just count it as a positive? That tells you that someone had it, but doesn't arbitrarily inflate the death statistics. If, however, your purpose is to use those death stats to justify the continued destruction of our economy, mental health, and education system, then that classification makes perfect sense.

Such cases are a source of public confusion, and some states, like Colorado, have begun reporting in a manner that differentiates between those who died “with” and “of” COVID-19.

And yet Oregon refuses to make this distinction between dying "of" and "with" covid. As explained by the Freedom Foundation

The definition suggests there are time limitations placed on what is considered a death “with COVID-19” (i.e., if enough time has passed since an individual had COVID-19, his or her death won’t necessarily be counted as a COVID-19 death).

But even if such time limitations are followed in practice, the case of the Malheur County man, who tested positive for COVID-19 after he died of an unrelated accident, shows that deaths unrelated to COVID-19 are still counted under OHA’s methodology.

Even within the definition’s parameters, the OHA’s methodology clearly has problems. Including the deaths of any individuals who have tested positive for the virus — and even some who haven’t — as “COVID-19 deaths” risks seriously inflating the state’s total number of fatalities from the virus. In Washington, for example, a similar methodology [inflated the state’s total number of COVID-19 deaths by as much as 13 percent.

But then, if your goal is not accuracy, but using stats as a weapon to force citizens into masks and lockdowns, then this makes perfect sense.