A few weeks ago, Bill Rice, Jr. highlighted a four-year-old San Jose Mercury News story about “early” U.S. COVID-19 deaths.
Reporter Harriet Blair Rowan wrote in August 2021 that death records showed the first COVID-related deaths occurred in January 2020, weeks earlier than thought and before officials “knew the virus was circulating.” A half dozen records from that month in six different states had been amended to list COVID-19 as a contributing factor, suggesting SARS-CoV-2 quickly reached beyond the known hotspots. A New York Times piece the same year carried the same theme; Rice pointed to both in his recent article.
I’d been aware of these deaths for a while and, like Rice, once considered them potential evidence that a risk-additive (though not especially deadly) coronavirus had been circulating in the U.S. long before emergency declarations.1
I also mentioned them in “The ‘Covid Death’ Reckoning,” where I reacted to a different Bill — Bill Hammond of Empire Center — who reported that New York’s state data had been adjusted to show one COVID-attributed death in the week of January 25, 2020, nearly two months earlier than the state’s official “first death.” As Hammond wrote, such deaths “if verified, would dramatically rewrite the timeline of New York’s pandemic.”
I affirmed the essence of what Hammond said:
In his April 14 article, “The Health Department Releases a Fuller Account of COVID’s Deadly First Year”, Empire Center’s Bill Hammond observes that federal data show one covid-attributed New York death in late January 2020, and several in February, “Those deaths, if verified, would dramatically rewrite the timeline of New York's pandemic.”
He’s right, but it goes beyond New York. The NCHS file Hammond is referencing shows January and February 2020 deaths in California, Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin. (Image of weekly U.S. totals in early 2020 below.)
CDC Explanation
Dr. Robert Anderson, chief of mortality statistics at the CDC, explained to the New York Times in September 2021 that many of these supposed January 2020 deaths were simply Checkuary mistakes (doctors forgetting to change the year to 2021) or other coding errors. In at least one case, he said, a medical certifier reclassified a death as COVID-related only to backtrack once the state intervened. Anderson conceded he couldn’t vouch for the accuracy of every amended certificate, but doubted certifiers would have changed them “capriciously.”
The six January 2020 deaths still appear in the CDC’s weekly provisional table, as do single-digit deaths in February. This is curious given the note beneath the table states that deaths counts between 1-9 are suppressed in accordance with NCHS confidentiality statements. The values for seven weeks in those first two months are not suppressed and Anderson’s explanation does nothing to explain why.2
FEMA Incentive Hypothesis
Given the timing, it’s surprising that Anderson didn’t offer the possible influence of the FEMA COVID-19 funeral assistance program. Established in March 2021 and relaxed in June 2021 for deaths dated between January 20 and May 16, 2020, the program allowed applicants to qualify for up to $9,000 in reimbursement with nothing more than a certifier’s letter linking the death to COVID-19. That rule change is a straightforward explanation for why “January 2020” deaths suddenly appeared in WONDER and in the media later that summer.
But FEMA records don’t perfectly align with the provisional tables. In New York City alone, there were eighteen January 2020 deaths and ten February deaths approved for payment,3 yet those are not reflected in the federal database. If FEMA were the only or main driver, you’d expect more than the 31 deaths that appear nationally. It’s possible, though, that after the 2021 media coverage the mechanism for such amendments was closed or states were given guidance not to continue revising older records.
That gap matters, because even if FEMA records across all states showed, say, 150 January 2020 deaths retroactively qualifying for funeral assistance, it still wouldn’t point to earlier circulation of a novel pathogen. It would show that when government rewards the reclassification of deaths, more deaths are reclassified. Translation: You get what you pay for.
That said, American officials should still be compelled to explain why those deaths appear at all — and why, in spite of their presence, the Department of Defense’s War’s Virus Progression Coronavirus Timeline still shows the first U.S. death from “the virus” in February 2020 rather than in January.
States don’t submit physical death certificates to the federal system; they submit death certificate data. Therefore, it makes sense that the agency would need to investigate “early” COVID deaths that pop up and couldn’t do so simply by pulling up a scanned record. See Hockett, J. (2024, May 16). “‘The CDC Does Not Maintain Complete Death Certificate Collections.’”Wood House 76.
You bring up a great point about the funeral fee generated "Covid" deaths.