A Colorado coroner blasted the state health department after discovering that gunshot victims were included in her county’s coronavirus death tolls.
Brenda Bock, a coroner in Grand County, Colo., said five of the county’s logged deaths include two gunshot wound victims who died from their injuries.
Both individuals tested positive for COVID-19 in the month before they died, Bock added, but the virus is not the reason they died.
“It’s absurd that they would even put that on there,” she said, according to CBS-4 Denver.
“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,” she continued. “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.”
The Colorado Department of Health claimed these individuals were included because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention requires state health departments to report “people who have died with COVID-19 in their systems, because it’s crucial for public health surveillance,” the department claimed.
Bock argued that the state health department is intentionally driving up COVID-19 death numbers and said she believes only one person in her county has died from the coronavirus.
“If we want the public to trust and believe the information being released, we need to make sure it is accurate,” she said.
“That might be the process, but it’s not right,” she continued. “… I strongly stand against that. … We do need to stand up and we do need to get these numbers corrected.”
Several states have been caught over-reporting coronavirus deaths.
Earlier this month, research indicated that Washington state’s coronavirus death tolls are riddled with cases—as much as 13% of the total—in which the death certificate made no reference to COVID-19 as a cause of death.
In several cases, gunshot deaths were chalked up to the virus as they were in Colorado.
“It’s a nakedly political act intended to scare the public into letting him continue to abuse the almost unlimited ‘emergency powers that have needlessly bankrupted thousands of Washington businesses and thrown tens of thousands of its residents out of work,” Aaron Withe, national director of the Freedom Foundation, said of Washington Gov. Jay Inslee.
