Who Died of Covid in Minnesota?

Researcher Marana Muse spent upwards of 1,500 hours studying Minnesota death certificates she obtained from the Minnesota Department of Health and uncovered “illogical” data.

April 13, 2022

https://alphanews.buzzsprout.com/1751353/10432190-ep-7-who-died-from-covid-19-in-minnesota-digging-into-the-data
or
https://rumble.com/v1198ul-who-died-from-covid-19-in-minnesota-digging-into-the-data-liz-collin-report.html

Two links to the same report and some of it transcribed below.

Really, take 15 and listen to this.

Researcher Going by Marana Muse spent upwards of 1,500 hours studying Minnesota death certificates she obtained from the Minnesota Department of Health and uncovered “illogical” data.

Muse and attorney Greg Pulles analyzed all Minnesota death certificates from 2020 and 2021 for COVID-19 and found that only 291, or 2.67% of the 10,903 certificates they examined, were “COVID only” with no comorbidity listed.

Liz:“Marana, it was your personal loss that led to this - - - Share what happened.” Marana: “Sure, in 2020 she had a couple deaths, dear friend died of 2020 of cancer. She tried to go to the hospital but was turned away, they didn’t diagnosis her until may, and them she ended up dying 7-8 months later. So I thought well that’s odd, we are all so worried about covid, we are not as concerned as other deaths. So birth father was diag with liver cancer in 2020, he also had covid in 2020 and only had a couple of months to live ---- fast forward a couple months and my step father got covid and passed away 2 months to the day from my father of covid and ah what is interesting to me in what is obviously a small sampling but I had two people close to me die that had nothing to do with covid or indirectly how we responded to covid and my step father died of covid. In all fairness to my step father he didn’t have long to live anyway, he had multiple comorbidities and is one of the people we should have been concentrating on to prevent unfortunate out comes. That is kinda where it started.”

Liz, “we are sorry for the loss but we are talking about how this pushes you to ask questions about how we are seeing deaths tabulated, specifically in Minnesota, so how do you go about doing this, gathering these death certificates?”

Marana: “I started spending a lot of time on the NBH situation update site and I started to learn everything I could about the information out there. Then I started extending into the CDC resources, I even stumbled across VP Pence guidance for reporting on covid. So I read the document completely, one interesting thing stuck out in that document as it pertains to hospital reporting. The question in the data was specific to either perceive positive or positive tests. So people that were in the hospital with covid as apposed due to. So I thought that was interesting, and if that would happen to hospitalizations naturally that would be happening with death, so I sent a note to my congresswoman and I asked a specific a question, I said the VP Pence’s reporting guidance doesn’t delineate, does the State of Minnesota and the answer was ‘no we don’t we just use what we were told by the Federal Government.’ Than I said I want to start looking at deaths myself, how do I get access to the death data. So she gave me the email of the office of vital records.”

Liz: “Explain to us what a death certificate looks like, and who is responsible for filling them out.”

Marana: “So, in full transparency, I haven’t seen the specific death certificates but I have the file, so for example; in 2020 there were 52,000 death certificates in Minnesota and so it is a spread sheet, there are 52,000 rows and there are 200 + columns of data on each person. So there is a lot of information they gather in addition to what is on the death certificate and who certifies them. I don’t recall what the law is in Minnesota but there peopel per state that are certified to complete death certificates, medical professionals are one, - - not always a physician.”

Liz: “You didn’t have to wait very long for this information”

Marana: “I just went through the screening process and I had to pay $20 and I got the email probably in a day.”

Liz: “what is standing out when you are looking at this?”

Marana: “well, there was a lot of data to go through so I spent a couple months understanding what the report was saying, there are no instruction on how to use the data so I had to figure out what it meant. And I started hiding information and I started doing queries on ‘what people were dying from’ who was dying at what ages’ etc.”

Liz: “and specifically you point to in this story, this ICD code, International Classification of Diseases, UO71”

Marana: “That is the WHO and CDC’s classification for, I think it stands for. ‘International Classification of Diseases, version 10, and that is what the CDC codes any death via covid.”

Liz: “So there are 10,984 such certificates that you find related to this in the two years, and explain that because before all these blanks didn’t have to be filled out on a death certificate but you found out that has changed.”

Marana: “So as it pertains to that, there’s two parts to a death certificate. Part 1 & Part 2. Part 1 there is 4 lines that describes the sequence of events that caused a person to pass away. Line “a” that was the last thing that caused the person to pass and you use the lines below it line “b” to add things that were part of that series. So as an example if you had covid that might be on line “b” and if covid phenomena caused you to stop breathing that could be acute respiratory distress syndrome and that might be on the line above it. So in that case, that would be a classic example of a covid death, it happens to be the exact one for my fathers death certificate as well.

Then in part “B” you might list comorbidities. So, speaking about my father again, not to share too much, but he did have COPD, he did have hypertension, he did have type two diabetes, normally you would see that in part 2 and that wasn’t included interestingly, so if you were to look at my fathers death certificate, you would think a perfectly 70 year old passed away of covid.”

Liz: “and that wasn’t the case, you’re the first to admit.”

Marana: “It was 100% not the case, he could have caught a cold or something and had the same outcome.”

Liz: “so your tracking this basically, monthly, it sounds like and ‘the more I learned the more mad I got’, those were your exact words.”

Marana: “That's correct. So I took time, I actually got the CDC’s death classification on my phone. So I can geek out and code pretty much any death certificate if I’m told what happened. Some people like to question ‘your not a physician Marana, what do you know?’ well you don’t have to be, you just have to know the process and use the tools that the CDC provides.

So what struck me as odd, the CDC, May of 2020 did a one hour education and it was an extenunion education so if you’re a physician it could be one of your hours, I took that class 4 times and took copious notes, it wasn’t hard to do. But what struck me as odd, is they specifically told you how to code the death certificate correctly for covid, and here is some of the important data points: 1 if covid had nothing to do with the death, they will put it on there. Now, that wasn’t overly emphasized and was actually indirectly said if something didn’t contribute to the death, than don’t put it on there, so indirectly they were saying if covid didn’t contribute to the death, don’t list it. But in another breath they said, ‘for historical purposes, we want to know who had covid, so if you think their was covid or they tested positive, that should be included.’ Well just because someone tests positive doesn’t mean covid has anything to do with death. Than they shared and said you should focus on the logical sequence. Again, the bottom line of part 1 being the underlying cause, back to my father, his underlying cause would be covid because that was on line “B” , the bottom most line of his death certificate. They said for example if you put COPD on line “C”, covid on line “B”, and Parkinson on line “A”, that is an illogical sequence. Its correct, it is illogical but they gave you the added guidance that you want to put covid at the bottom of that sequence. The reason you want to do that is COPD doesn’t cause COVID. OK that is true, but the reverse is true. Covid doesn’t cause COPD. So to me that stuck out as a very illogical sequence. And I can understand going back to my dad, that was a logical sequence. But when you start seeing death certificates with Parkinsons, blunt force trauma to the head, a bunch of conditions? Those aren’t logical sequences, those are just conditions that someone’s had. So when you start listing off conditions, it is not obvious that which of those conditions caused a person to die. Does that make sense?”

Liz:: “Yeah, and I think we will get into some of those findings in just a minute, it really is fascinating how you were to break that down. But you wanted to do something with this information, which I commend you for doing so. (13:43) So you just took it to a local school board and wanted to talk about it, basically to reassure the kids would be alright. I think that was your message.”

Marana: “Yes, I was hyper focused on getting kids back in school. Before I share that, a little anecdotal side note which I want to put in perspective why I chose to participate. Is my daughter was in school 2020/202` all day every day, I’m very proud of that, of course they were in masks, but some of the other schools — we had a surge of cases in the fall of 2020 so we were trying to minimize the chances of the school shutting down, so we decided to get creative solutions together because there was mandatory quarantineing required so we spread out all the desks 6 feet apart, so then kids wouldn’t have to be quarantined. Then we needed Parent Proctors, in order to oversea all these different areas of the school. So I volunteered 3 days a week 2 hours each so I watched what happened in the school and a few things stuck out. We could control what was happening while kids were sitting at their desk, they were 6 feet apart, they had their masks on, etc. etc. etc but as soon as they are walking hallways they are sharing drinks, they are sharing food, they pile into the same car to go home and take off their masks, so like how do we know what we are doing at school is having any effect?”

Liz:: “is working”.

Marana: “So all that had me hyper-focused on school.” (15:38)

the first 15 min...

Comorbidity often refers to disorders that are often coexistent with each other, such as depression and anxiety disorders. The concept of multcoimorbidity is related to comorbidity but presents a different meaning and approach.