A 51-year-old Croatian man fell off a ladder and died in a workplace accident, but his cause of death may surprise you. It wasn’t the impact of the fall or brain damage that was ultimately listed as his cause of death – it was coronavirus.
This is according to the Journal of Forensic Pathology, who reports that the man fell off a 10-foot ladder while working on a home as part of his construction job. His external injuries were minor, including cuts and bruises, but he also experienced a subarachnoid hemorrhage, which is an often-fatal condition that entails bleeding in the space between the brain and the tissues covering the brain. The man was declared dead at the scene of the accident.
However, the autopsy also found that significant portions of his lungs were blocked. This led scientists to conclude that he had suffered from the life-threatening Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome, or ARDS, that some COVID-19 patients are experiencing.
The Journal reported that the man had been complaining of a respiratory-like illness during the days leading up to the accident. He had complained of symptoms such as fatigue, cough, fever, headache and shortness of breath but decided against seeing a doctor.
In a post-mortem test, he tested positive for coronavirus, and the Journal wrote that his death was ruled as natural and caused by COVID-19 rather than the deadly fall. The doctors explained that because the illness stops air from flowing into the lungs, it could have caused his fall. Under World Health Organization guidelines, his death must be recorded as a COVID-19 fatality.
Some hospitals have a financial incentive to attribute deaths to COVID
Some state health departments in the U.S. have been coaching doctors to list COVID-19 as the cause of death in patients even if it was only suspected and the patient was not even tested.
In fact, one County Health Officer in California, Gail Newell, said: “If anyone that has a COVID diagnosis dies, it automatically feeds into the database as a COVID death, even if it wasn’t a COVID death. For example, a 25-year-old dies in a motorcycle accident and then our coroner finds out that he incidentally did have COVID at the time, the state counts that as a COVID death, although he clearly died in a motorcycle accident.”
Unfortunately, there is a major financial motivation for hospitals to pad the numbers of people who are dying from the virus. San Jose naturopathic physician Tim O’Shea said that while MediCal pays $4,600 for a pneumonia diagnosis, that jumps to around $39,000 if the patient also tests positive for COVID.
This may also explain why a man who was killed in a deadly Florida motorcycle crash was also listed as a COVID-19 death in the state. When FOX 35 News questioned Orange County Health Officer Dr. Raul Pino about whether two people in their 20s listed as coronavirus deaths had underlying conditions, he responded that one had none and had actually died in a motorcycle accident, raising a lot of questions about how COVID-19 deaths are being reported there. The doctor went on to say that it could be argued that the COVID-19 actually caused him to crash.
These stories just go to show how hard it is to trust the numbers when it comes to COVID-19. Of course it’s a deadly disease that we should all take seriously and do our best to avoid, but dying with COVID is far, far different from dying from COVID, and that is an important distinction that should be made to paint a more accurate picture of what we are dealing with.
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