Statistics

Refrigerated Trucks for Piles of COVID-19 Bodies: Reader Writes

Reader JC emailed with this (which I’m using with permission, with added paragraphifications for screen readability):

Matt,

I thought you might enjoy a panic moment. I’m a funeral director and embalmer (and recovering analyst) in [State]. We are experiencing a normal year with regard to death rate, and have had 66 “Covid” deaths (my experience is about 1 in 4 actually die *from* COVID-19, while most die from a terminal illness while the health department requires presumed or known positive coronavirus infections have COVID listed as a UCOD, per State guidelines). So you’re 100% correct in labeling attributions as such.

Regardless, our local health department went Full Doom and ordered 4 refrigerated semi trailers from the [nmaed] plant located in our county. Keep in mind, even in a real mass-casualty event, refrigeration is not a huge worry, as funeral homes tend to respond within minutes or an hour at most, and our hospitals are already prepared with their own morgues. Advanced decomposition takes hold in normal climates after 48 hours or more.

Local DHS emergency managers forecast a worst-case scenario of 5 deaths per day over the usual 4 [or] ~70 deaths per week (their scenario lasts 3 weeks). Area funeral homes have combined capacity for 150 deaths per week, or about twice the worst case scenario, and we work together if a need arises.

Most baffling for us undertakers, however, is that health departments are not – nor will ever be- responsible for the care of deceased human bodies. Even if we did have a mass casualty event, these trucks would not be used. You might say “dude, I’m sure they contacted other funeral directors”.

So I called all 7 funeral homes in the area. Nobody is drowning in bodies, though one lady director had zero deaths, while another guy had a relatively busy 13 deaths last week, including 2 doom deaths. “Well maybe they called hospitals and nursing homes”.

Both local hospitals last Friday provided press releases in response to this move to communicate how LOW their respective death rates have been of late, and that the busiest ward has a “full” 19 COVID beds for a hospital with 298 beds in a county of 107,000 people. Rarely is a body refrigerated in any death, even in big cities, yet last week we started getting calls from panicked community members, including the CEO of one of the hospitals.

The only reasonable explanation is that they’re just warming up for the real party:

“People are not wearing masks,” [County Commissioner] said in the video statement. “The hospitals are already pretty much at capacity … they’re busting at the seams … employees are stressed out. This is overwhelming the community.”

Although the county commission has the ability to put new restrictions in place and “shut the county down,” [he] said, “we’re not going to do that.”

Regards,

JC

No sanity, not even in death.

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Categories: Statistics

30 replies »

  1. Thank you, JC. I wish more people understood these realities. Of course, most people stay away from funeral homes and their functions except when they have no choice. Same for hospitals.

    I truly think covid is a test of how utterly stupid and uninformed humans are. And we’re ranking below room temperature on the IQ scale, off the charts on gullibility. However, it’s much easier to terrify stupid people then “save” them than take a countries by force (proud to be so stupid is easiest and Americans are again off the chart on that one). So, testing continues……until the final goal is implemented. Cave men were smarter than most humans now. Mostly because they got eaten by saber-tooth tigers if they were not. Anyone got any spare saber-tooth tigers out there?

  2. It’s pretty easy to refute this kind of hysteria with some simple math.

    Very rough rule of thumb says that 0.008% of Americans will die every year, which works out to 2.8 million per year or 7,200 per day.

    You can run that percentage through the population of any subdivision and come up with a very close estimate of the annual mortality rate in that locale. Then compare it with total covid deaths. Most places, total covid deaths are about 5-10% of total expected deaths, probably lower when you consider that most covid deaths aren’t “new” deaths and probably would have been there eventually, anyway.

    Most places can handle a 5% surge and they’re not bringing in ice trucks.

    That said, there is another angle to the refrigerated trucks panic, and that’s directly a result of the panic itself.

    I’ve heard that in most places, they treat covid deaths differently than “normal” deaths and require the medical examiner or coroner to get involved before the death certificate is released. In those cases, then I COULD see a need to store those bodies longer than usual since the medical examiner usually doesn’t see every single death every single day in most places, but it’s a fallacious conclusion to think that covid deaths are causing a surge in overall deaths.

    The numbers simply don’t add up – even we assume that the sanctimoniously cited “260,000 people died!” number is 100% additive (which it’s not), that’s still only about 10% of total expected deaths for the year so far.

    This all gets back to Briggs’s use of total mortality in the updates every week: there simply aren’t enough dead people lying around to match up with the hype.

  3. “THE STUPID – IT BURNS”

    Thank you Sheri for that little phrase, it has stuck in my head and it gets repeated there with sickening frequency every day.

    I went to the grocery store yesterday, and yes – we have returned to our tried and true pandemic survival practice of clearing out all the toilet paper. Even worse now, because the store has set a buy limit on that stuff.

    You can’t educate this kind of stupid….

  4. Sam, et al;

    Google “county orders four refrigerated trailers”.

    JR,

    You’re on the right track. Speaking for what little I know locally, we could handle a 100% surge for a short while, and do on occasion. Remember that deaths vary little on aggregate, but at the municipal or even MSA level, wide swings can occur due to a variety of factors, including the spread of (iatrogenic or endemic) communicable diseases. Funeral homes vary by 100% of average week to week sometimes, but that variance is lost in annualized death rates at the state/national level.

    Second, while a certifying physician is needed in order to procure death certificates (which can take a while) coroners or MEs typically do not get involved initially when the cause of death is known, and that does not hinder funeral homes from taking physical custody of a deceased human body (in Indiana).

  5. JC, thanks for that interesting report. It’s very helpful to hear from people with direct knowledge of events, and the expertise to put things in perspective.

    And along that line, I just spent a worthwhile five minutes listening to Dr. Roger Hodkinson flay COVID 19 hysteria during a Zoom meeting of the Edmonton City Council’s Community and Public Services Committee, held on November 13, 2020. The hearing was for public input on a proposal to extend Edmonton’s mask diktat to May. It was quite good, so I made a transcript, below, with a link at bottom if you want to listen yourself to a fine example of public speaking.

    “Mr. Chairman, this is Dr Hodkinson, […] Thank you very much, I do appreciate the opportunity to address you on this very important matter. What I’m going to say is lay language, and blunt. It’s counter-narrative, and so you don’t immediately think I’m a quack I’m going to briefly outline my credentials so that you can understand where I’m coming from in terms of knowledge base in all this. I’m a medical specialist in pathology, which includes virology. I trained at Cambridge University in the U.K. I’m the ex-president of the pathology section of the medical association. I was previously an assistant professor in the faculty of medicine, doing a lot of teaching. I was the chairman of the Royal College of Physicians of Canada examination committee in pathology, in Ottowa. But more to the point, I’m currently the chairman of a bio-technology company in North Carolina selling a COVID 19 test, and you might say I know a little bit about all this.

    The bottom line is simply this: there is utterly unfounded public hysteria, driven by the media and politicians. It is outrageous. This is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on an unsuspecting public. There is absolutely nothing that can be done to contain this virus, other than protecting your more vulnerable people. It should be thought of as nothing more than a bad flu season. This is not ebola, it’s not SARS. It’s politics playing medicine, and that’s a very dangerous game. There is no action of any kind needed, other than what happened last year when we got ourselves unwell; we stayed home, we took chicken noodle soup, we didn’t visit Granny, and WE decided, when we would return to work. We didn’t need anyone to tell us.

    Masks are utterly useless. There is no evidence base for their effectiveness whatsoever. Paper masks and fabric masks are simply virtue signaling, they’re not even worn effectively most of the time. It’s utterly ridiculous seeing these unfortunate, uneducated people — I’m not saying that in a pejorative sense — seeing these people walking around like lemmings, obeying without any knowledge base, put the mask on their face.

    Social distancing is also useless because COVID is spread by aerosol, which travels 30 meters or so before landing. And closures have had such terrible unintended consequences. Everywhere should be open tomorrow, as was stated in the Great Barrington Declaration, that I circulated prior to this meeting.

    And a word on testing: I do want to emphasize that I’m in the business of testing for COVID. I want to emphasize that positive results DO NOT — underlined in neon! — mean a clinical infection. It’s simply driving public hysteria, and all testing should STOP, unless you’re presenting to hospital with some respiratory problem. All that should be done is to protect the vulnerable, and to give them all, in the nursing homes that are under your control, give them all three to five thousand international units of vitamin D every day, which has been shown to radically reduce the likelihood of infection.

    And I would remind you all, that using the Province’s own statistics, the risk of death for those under sixty-five, in this Province, is one in three hundred thousand [1 in 300,000]. One in three hundred thousand! You’ve got to get a grip on this! The scale of the response that you are undertaking, with no evidence for it, is utterly ridiculous, given the consequences of acting in the way that you’re proposing; all kinds of suicides, business closures, funerals, weddings, et cetera, et cetera. It’s simply outrageous. It’s just another bad flu! And you’ve got to get your minds around that.

    Let people make their own decisions. You should be totally out of the business of medicine. You’re being led down the garden path by the chief medical officer of health for this Province. I’m absolutely outraged that this has reached this level. It should all stop tomorrow. Thank you very much.”

    [Zoom meeting leader]: “Well, thank you for that, again, hopefully, all layers of government are listening, ah, we have the least amount of influence, but we definitely appreciate everything you’ve had to say.”

    https://www.bitchute.com/video/OD0uZRAtD1Se/

  6. While at a funeral earlier this week, the director said, “We’ve not had one single death due to COVID. However, we have had one death due to carbon monoxide poisoning, which was noted on the death certificate by the doctor. The poor woman was so terrified of getting COVID she wore her mask all the time, even to sleep. The doctor instructed her children, with whom she lived to sneak into her bedroom and remove the mask if they could.”

    Additionally, another person shared a story of how a waitress got thrush from wearing her mask for her 7 hour shifts in the summer heat and humidity.

    Can you spell i-n-s-a-n-i-t-y?

  7. I say follow the money in the case of the refrigerated trucks. Who benefitted from selling 4 of them to the county in question.

  8. Quite a read:

    https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden-averted/2017-2018.htm#:~:text=(Table%203).-,Conclusion,severe%20seasonal%20influenza%20can%20be

    2017/2018 Take aways :
    2017/2018 : Mid-October to Mid-April (6 or 7 months) (Carona on our tenth month)

    an estimated 45 million people getting sick with influenza (Carona : 12 million positive tests – wait for estimate – 2009 H1N1 pandemic, when an estimated 60 million people were sick with influenza)

    810,000 hospitalizations (Carona : I last ballparked around 600-700 thousand, I’d have to reresearch how I got that – Doomers woukld say Hospitalizations are longer in duration for Caronadoom)

    The 2017–2018 influenza season was additionally atypical in that it was severe for all ages
    the rates of influenza-associated hospitalization are generally higher for the very young and the very old
    while this was also true during the 2017–2018 season, rates of hospitalization in all age groups were the highest seasonal rates seen since hospital-based surveillance was expanded in 2005 to include all ages
    an estimated 11 million cases of influenza in children, 28 million cases of influenza in working age adults (aged 18-64 years), and 6 million cases in adults aged 65 years and older. (CARONADOOM “CASES” have only recently surpassed JUST the child cases of 2017/18!!!)

    More than 46,000 hospitalizations occurred in children (aged < 18 years); however, 67% of hospitalizations occurred in older adults aged ?65 years. Older adults also accounted for 83% of deaths … estimating that there were more than 640 deaths associated with influenza in children.

    CDC estimates that influenza vaccination during the 2017–2018 influenza season prevented 6.2 million illnesses, 3.2 million medical visits, 91,000 hospitalizations and 5,700 deaths associated with influenza

    So vaccinating 37% of the populace only minimized the flu by 10%

  9. “You can’t educate this kind of stupid….”

    Oh, but you can. Have you attended one of our progressive Universities, not to mention our liberal-run public schools? And, yes, I realize that “progressive University” is, for the great majority of Universities, redundant.

  10. What is the difference between “paragraphifications” or “paragraphinations”? DuckDuckGo was unrevealing, except that a certain wmbriggs appears prominently for both.

    They say, of course, that when pondering seemingly inexplicable behavior, “follow the money”. The key to understanding perhaps lies in the sentence “. . . our local health department . . . ordered 4 refrigerated semi trailers from the [named] plant located in our county.” I.e., local government buyer giving taxpayer money to a local company for no good reason – perhaps there is a familial relationship in the mix? Or perhaps the vendor of the refrigerated trucks is a campaign donor? And there’s always just run-of-the-mill graft.

    https://fox59.com/news/coronavirus/vigo-county-orders-semi-trailers-to-house-bodies-of-people-who-die-from-covid-19/

    On the other hand, we must never forget Hanlon’s razor.

  11. No one wants to be educated. They refuse.

    I was on a road trip a few weeks ago to my native WV, driving through southeast Ohio toward Athens, a university town. Looked up and saw a large billboard on US 33. The message was (and I’m paraphrasing now) “MASK UP, ATHENS”. The message was repulsive enough, but I’m kind of calloused to it now. The jaw-dropper was the artwork. I swear, it could have come directly from North Korea or Red China. A young girl, obviously a SJW co-ed, drawn in that righteous, zealous look of the True Believer….her eyes looking up in revolutionary fervor, wearing her mask uniform. Like I said, I’m usually calloused to the idiotic messages of the Covid panic brigade, but this was something else. Quite scary.

  12. Mr. Hathaway: ”What is the difference between “paragraphifications” or “paragraphinations”?

    Sir: “Paragraphifications”, refers to the paragraphicaliciousness of the proposed paragraphalizations.

    “Paragraphinations”, refers to the paragraphology of subset delineations construing paragrapholotomous reifications of phenomenology.

    I thought everyone knew this. Fallen times, indeed.

  13. Dean : “paragraphicalifragilisticexpialidocious”

    Briggs is Bert the chimney sweep?
    It’s a good things he cleans off his black face before tapdancing with penguins or there’d be hell to pay

    Jerry

    “road trip a few weeks ago to my native WV”
    Got John Denver cranked up?
    Driving down the road did you get a feeling you shoulda been home yesterday

    No longer almost heaven? Haven’t heard it in ages myself

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d9MZs8DpjA

  14. “Very rough rule of thumb says that 0.008% of Americans will die every year, which works out to 2.8 million per year or 7,200 per day.”
    About 1 percent of the population dies every year or about 3 million. CIA factbook.

  15. I’m traveling to see family for Thanksgiving and I’m happy to report there was a high level of non-compliance with the stay home orders on the highways.

    The road manners were unusually good as well. I believe this is because the Corona-chan worshippers who can’t drive are the ones staying home wetting their beds.

  16. ”The road manners were unusually good as well.”

    Welcome news. Where I live the drivers are all crazed maniacs.

  17. We like to ring in the holidays with a couple of 4-way stop sign shoot-outs
    up here. Gets everyone in the mood.

  18. Jerry: I saw the toilet paper hoarding coming and stocked up all summer. Same for many other items. I have the space to do so. (I don’t recall where I got the saying “the stupid, it burns”, but it does stick with one. Glad you liked it, sad I have to use it so often.)

    Jim F: LOL Love that one!

  19. Oh, forgot this:

    https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/the-national-guard-has-been-deployed-to-el-paso-to-provide-support-with-the-morgue-crisis

    It has a picture of the trucks “in use”, or that’s what the caption says. There is a huge outbreak in El Paso and it’s warm down there. Maybe they really do need the trucks, maybe it’s just theatre like the Chinese used on us when this whole mess began. No way to know without a trip to El Paso and that’s not happening.

  20. There wasn’t a Toilet Paper shortage here until just a couple of days ago.

    Strangely it followed several days of reports in the news about how “Experts suspect that fears of a toilet paper shortage may cause panic buying, which will in itself cause a shortage.”

    Then after the shortage occurred the story became “It appears that people stocked up in an act of panic buying, but no one is sure why they thought there would be a shortage.”

    Yeah, it’s a real mystery.

  21. We set out flags out a cemetery over Veterans week (flags went out on the Saturday preceding and were picked up the Saturday after Veterans Day). The worst job you can get during this activity is the guy at the front who hands out flags and maps to the Scouts. Someone has to manage the maps. But this gave me time to talk to the lady who interfaces with the Scouts to put out the flags. We are experiencing a surge right now in Covid, but very few deaths. She said they normally see 5-6 bodies a week. From April to September it had fallen to less than 3. They have picked up this month and business is brisk. Business is not overwhelming.

    A friend of mine is pointing at the refrigerated trucks as PROOF of the doom. “They have to have those trucks in front”.

    That friend will be getting a link to this article… You know who you are…

  22. Just a thought: Perhaps these refrigerated trucks are not for covid-19 bodies, but for storage of the new covid-19 vaccines?

    See this, regarding vaccine refrigerated truck market:
    https://kyt24.com/uncategorized/193929/vaccine-refrigerated-truck-market-2020-business-overview-citroen-volkswagen-fiat-peugeot/

    And this, regarding covid-19 vaccines needing cold storage:
    https://www.newsmax.com/health/headline/coldstorage-coronavirus-vaccine/2020/09/04/id/985471/

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