Republished from 16 October 2025 Wood House 76 article, with minor edits, additions, and a status update.
In the second week of April 2020, just after the peak of the biggest mass casualty event in New York City history, the health department announced it was adding 3,778 “probable coronavirus deaths” to the running COVID death toll.
This move instantly raised the total by ~50%, triggered other states following suit immediately, and set the precedent for the U.S. “confirmed + probable” reporting standard adopted later that spring. It also triggered a reaction from President Donald Trump, who said the deaths were being added “just in case” heart attack victims “had the virus”.
A full explanation of why officials said this was done, and whether the actions taken stand up to scrutiny, is something I’m still sorting through alongside the other problems with a death spike I believe is a false presentation of reality.
Here I focus on my attempts to compel the agency responsible for reporting those deaths to explain where the probables “went”.
What’s a probable?
It’s first important to understand that probable cases and deaths are not a COVID-Era phenomenon but something of a norm in epidemiology, public health surveillance, and disease/illness outbreaks. A probable case is one that doesn’t meet the standard of a confirmed case, but is classified as a case nonetheless for reporting purposes.
Dr. Kelly Frazier (my sister) worked in Ebola and Lassa fever outbreaks and explained “probable deaths” to me as those which lack a confirmatory test result:
“Often people die without testing before an outbreak is known or even expected,” she said. “It’s only in retrospect that those cases were initial cases or sometimes later cases that never got tested.”
Her description fits the definition of a probable COVID-19 case published by the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists in April 2020. (Full document with clinical, epidemiological, and vital record criteria here.) In practical terms, early on, a probable COVID case was one suspected of being a “case” for clinical or other reasons without a positive specimen to back it up.
It’s more obvious now than it was in 2020 that the introduction of “probable” COVID deaths worked hand-in-hand with the highly specious storyline that New York City had been caught unprepared for — and then “hit hard by” — a novel, disease-causing, spreading pathogen. Per the narrative, if only there had been enough tests, we would know for certain (rather than “probably”) that even more people had died from COVID than official numbers showed.
No positive test is not synonymous with never tested, however, and if one thing is clear from health department data, it’s that New York was giving thousands of tests a day right off the bat,1 seeing a remarkably high percent positivity, and conducting repeat-testing on hospital patients — including those with suspected COVID.2
Over 262,000 tests given with 143,000 positive results, for a cumulative positivity rate of 54.71% by 15 April 2020, is not only “enough,” it’s grounds for a federal investigation.
Nothing I say from this point forward should be taken to mean that I accept any deaths labeled “probable” or “confirmed COVID” as evidence of a new disease. There was no “outbreak” of a spreading SARS-related coronavirus in New York City in the spring of 2020, nor in Bergamo or anyplace else. What occurred instead was the rollout of a test, accompanied by an onslaught of propaganda and staged operations involving military and intelligence actors that together created the appearance of an outbreak.
Even readers who disagree with those assertions can share the desire for officials to be held accountable for testing and death curves in the New York event.
What happened to the probables? Freedom of Information request to NYC Department of Health
To probe the probable-COVID deaths further, I asked the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOH) for the following records, on 4 February 2025:
- Dates of death for all NYC resident deaths initially recorded as “probable” COVID-19 deaths.
- Dates of death for all deaths occurring in NYC initially recorded as “probable” COVID-19 deaths. Excel spreadsheet preferred. Please provide data as frequencies and use ‘0’ for dates on which no such deaths occurred.
After multiple delays, the records access officer wrote on 16 July 2025:
Dear Ms. Hockett:
My apologies for the delay. After consulting with staff in the Bureau of Vital Statistics, I have determined that the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene does not have data responsive to this request.
Should you wish to contest this determination, you may submit a written appeal within 30 days of this message to:
Chari Anhouse
Records Access Appeals Officer and Associate General Counsel
Email: recordsaccess@health.nyc.gov
The notice of appeal should include the request control number, the date of this message, a description of the records that were the subject of the request, the specific legal grounds for your appeal, and the full name and email address of the original requester.
My apologies again for the delay.
It can’t possibly be true that the Department “does not have data responsive to this request,” since the deaths appear in records that are already public. So, instead of filing an appeal, I submitted a new, more specific request using those records.
2020 Vital Statistics Report
Based on observations I made in April 2023 (“The COVID Death Reckoning”), I asked for dates of death for deaths originally counted as probable COVID-19 deaths on page 66 of the city’s 2020 Vital Statistics report, i.e., 5,405 deaths, 2,017 of which appear to have been counted in the finalized numbers as COVID-19 deaths under WHO ICD-10 guidelines, and the remaining 3,338 Other deaths.
DOH Probable/Confirmed Github File
I also requested records concerning a seemingly-abandoned data file in a DOH GitHub repository: https://github.com/nychealth/coronavirus-data/blob/master/archive/probable-confirmed-dod.csv
The data begin on 11 March 2020, the day of the first official COVID-blamed death in New York City — which was also the day the declared a WHO pandemic — and run only through 11 November 2020. The last file update occurred on 13 December 2020. (Full history accessible here; insights from readers welcome.)
Deaths are reported in three columns: confirmed, probable, and incomplete.
The ‘incomplete’ column shows 7,000 deaths total, reported in increments of 1,000 per day, from November 1st through November 7th.
The health department needs to explain what the incomplete numbers are, i.e., whether their presence means anything, why the file ends in early November (four days after the Presidential election on November 3rd), and whether and how these 7,000 “incompletes” are accounted for in the 2020 Vital Statistics report.
I attached a screenshot of page 66 from the Vital Stats report, a table showing the sum of the GitHub data, and a graph showing the plotted numbers to my final request (shown below, sent 28 August 2025).
Coincidence or coordination?
At the risk of making too much of “the 7,000,” which could simply be an artifact of system-generated “placeholders,” it’s worth noting two coincidences:
1. Non-COVID excess reported during the death spike were between 6,500 – 6,800, depending on source, city or federal (city shown in figure below).
2. The number of deaths associated with receiving FEMA COVID-19 funeral assistance is also not far from 7,000, at 7,446. (Darker green bar, shown below).
Alongside a range of other serious problems involving the spring 2020 death spike, the probables shell game and 7,000 “incompletes” look every bit like a model was being applied to COVID death reporting.3
In the “The F Word”4 I said I believe a data-engineered all-cause curve would involve forethought but proposed an alternative too:
I could also envision a scenario where the ScaryModels flashed on screens as Harbingers of Doom set a bar that couldn’t be reached. Allow me to explain:
Despite what public officials, the CNN news crawler, and Johns Hopkins University implied, real-time death reporting isn’t possible, simply due to how deaths are processed. It’s possible various dashboards were too generous in their real-time reporting, and there was a genuine “Uh oh” moment on the part of officials when reality wasn’t able to keep up with or “realize” the models’ predictions. Rather than admit an error, steps were taken to cover it up by manipulating data to make deaths — and possibly other data like ambulance dispatches — “fit” the event which models had fed into reporting systems.
The history of the GitHub file at the center of my FOI request to the health department contains entries suggesting that data were being altered or moved: “restoring probable confirmed dod [day of death]” and “fix problem with probable-confirmed dod.” These appear to reflect attempts to reconcile or sustain reported death counts, some portion of which may not have occurred within the stated timeframe, let alone resulted from a novel illness the WHO called COVID-19.
The department of health records officer said I can expect a response to my request by mid-November.
Probably.
UPDATE, 30 November 2025: The request due date came and went without a response. I’ve asked for an update on the status but haven’t yet received a reply.
In August 2023, a few months after writing “The ‘Covid death’ Reckoning,” I described to Randall Bock how “the probable COVID deaths” in New York City could have been one mechanism for all-cause death fraud. Go to 1 hour, 11 minutes in this video; segment transcript provided here.
UPDATE, 14 January 2026:
- For comparison, the 2019-2020 flu-test season peak in NYC was ~2,000/test per day ↩︎
- See pages 8-9, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2020, April 6). Clinical
Laboratory COVID-19 response call transcript[PDF].
https://www.cdc.gov/locs/preparedlabs/documents/covid-19-responsecalls/
04_06_2020_transcript.pdf ↩︎ - Thomas Verduyn used different data sources but came to a similar conclusion in “The
Dashboard that Ruled the World”, albeit about deaths attributed to COVID per se, whereas I
am looking at the probables as a signal that the all-cause mortality curve is manipulated. ↩︎ - As well as earlier and more simply in “Where is the Proof that Over 37,000 People Died in
New York City in 11 Weeks?” (8 September 2023) ↩︎
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