Reiterating the audacity of what is being claimed and sharing my outstanding FOI request to the NYC medical examiner’s office.
The post is inspired by ongoing conversations with my friend Steve Lucie, a fifth-generation farmer in central Illinois. Steve and I don’t see eye-to-eye on every COVID issue, but we are in complete agreement about this much:
There is simply no way New York City hospitals handled ~15K+ extra inpatient deaths in eleven weeks.1
Like me, Steve wonders who and what all was involved in handling so many corpses. “Where were all of the people and the bodies? Have you thought about it?” he asked in a recent video. “Who did that work?”
I’m not a farmer and I’ve never worked in a hospital. But I waited tables in my teens & early 20s and married a restaurant chef, so I understand the basics of systems that involve human “turnover.”
Considering multiple data points and contemporaneous reports, I doubt anything higher than a 100% increase in patient deaths was possible in the timeframe. I can push it to 150%, depending on how many “damaged ship” patients already in hospitals were quickly DNR’d or euthanized.
Potential Explanation
One potential explanation for the specious hospital toll is that the ~10,000 hospital deaths suddenly processed by the NYC OCME at the end of April 2020 were either not real deaths or not real-time deaths. Completely fabricated deaths are only one way something like this could be accomplished.
Hospitals were slated to lose millions of dollars from canceled surgeries and other measures taken to keep people away (e.g., the “Stay Home, Save Lives” message, Matilda’s Law, directives to EMTs)2. The CARES Act incentivized testing patients and designating those who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 as deaths with or due to “COVID-19.” Those payments would not have been enough to compensate hospitals for reduced patient intake & volume. Facilities likely missed 1-2 “turns,” if not more, in spring of 2020.
One can imagine alternative ways of NYC hospitals getting paid for those missed turns, such as digital legerdemain executed by federal actors or the military. If New York was used strategically to stage a pandemic, “thanking” hospitals for participating in a City Seized by Deadly Virus exercise could’ve involved manipulating data to reimburse hospitals for patients they normally would’ve seen by adding more dead patients. Without death certificates, a complete list of names, or other proof, I can’t be sure every death NYC hospitals were paid for is connected to a real patient’s death.
UPDATE 5/14/24: In further support for this idea, consider the following: New York City has a normal systemwide capacity of 20,000 beds. State data show peak spring 2020 occupancy of 20,009 patients on April 12, 2020. Inpatient deaths were nearly that high. Were hospitals paid for a dead patient in every bed when perhaps only half that number died?
Waiting on OCME Records…
I haven’t given up trying to get more information about the OCME’s end-April-2020 processing event.
I sent this request to OCME on December 8, 2023:
Pursuant to FOIL, I request the following records
1) Number of cremation permit applications/requests received daily between 1/1/2018 – 12/22/2022
2) Number of cremation permit applications/requests approved daily 1/1/2018 – 12/22/2022
3) Number of burial permit applications/requests received daily 1/1/2018 – 12/22/2022
4) Number of burial permit applications/requests approved daily 1/1/2018 – 12/22/2022
5) Number of autopsies performed weekly by the OCME between 1/1/2018 and 12/31/2022. Use zero (0) for any weeks in which zero autopsies were conducted
6) Underlying cause of death determination for all deaths for which OCME determined cause of death for deaths occurring between 10/1/2019 and 12/31/2022. Please provide the determinations and data in a weekly format, if possible.
7) Dates of death for all deaths processed by OCME, occurring between 1/1/2018 – 12/22/2022
8) All directives, orders, reports, memos, emails, and/or presentations that explain or mention the OCME’s processing of 12,663 deaths during the week of April 26th, 2020 – May 2, 2020.
9) All job/staff positions posting by OCME between 3/1/2020 and 5/1/2020. Please include date of posting and records showing whether each position was filled and on what date (day/month/year).
On December 19, 2023, the OCME records access officer replied,
Good afternoon Jessica Hockett,
This email is an acknowledgement of your Freedom of Information Law (“FOIL”) request dated December 8, 2023. The Office of Chief Medical Examiner is in the process of reviewing and evaluating your request. Please expect a response by March 19, 2024.
The OCME requires clarification from you regarding item #6. What do you mean by “Please provide the determinations and data […]?” Does determinations refer to the cause of death determinations? Which OCME records do you reference with the term “data?”3
Please note that the OCME cannot issue responsive records for items #3 and #4. Our agency does not issue or administer burial permits.4
Thank you,
Alison L. Nixon
Records Access Officer
I replied the next day, December 20, 2023:
Good day!
This is a response to your requests for clarification (copied below).
For item 6, I am requesting data in the form of numerical frequencies that represent the number of cause of death determinations of a certain kind. In previous communications, OCME staff told me that OCME does not use WHO-ICD codes in its databases. Therefore, I’m unsure how OCME categorizes cause of death determinations.
By “determinations,” I mean deaths for which OCME determined the decedent’s underlying cause of death.
Please feel free to call me at [number redacted] for further clarification, if needed.
Thank you!!
After waiting five months for a response, I emailed Ms. Nixon on April 8, 2024 and requested a status update.
She replied on April 10, 2024:
Thank you for your email. The OCME is still working to address the items in your FOIL request for which there are responsive records. Please expect a response on October 19, 2024.
October is inexcusably late.
I’ve asked that items be sent as they are available rather than all at once. I’m hopeful OCME will honor that request but won’t be surprised if they don’t.
UPDATE, 5/17/24: Ms. Nixon replied, “OCME will endeavor to release the records which are responsive to your request as they become available, but please be advised that the October 19, 2024 fulfillment date remains operative” and she sent me a record in fulfillment of request #9.
UPDATE 9/19/24: In the comments below, Denis Rancourt stated, “NYC handles a lot of deaths, and it has death-surge capacity for heat waves, cold snaps, major accidents, etc.”
Sorting deaths per day from most to least going back to 1999 makes obvious that the city had no prior experience in recent decades (if ever) handling the number of bodies it claimed to have handled in late March and April 2020.
Footnotes
- Deaths in Emergency Departments/Outpatient not included. With those numbers, the hospital toll exceeds ~22,000. ↩︎
- Matilda’s Law was not a law; it was an illegal mass quarantine order for elderly people. ↩︎
- I agree that my language was unclear. ↩︎
- This request was my error. I am working on getting that information from the appropriate city agency (which is not OCME). ↩︎
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