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The overwhelming number of deaths, over 75 percent, occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities. So really these are people who were unwell to begin with.”

That declaration by the director of the Centers for Disease Control, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, is one of those fall-out-of-your-chair moments. You’re tempted to repeat it several times just to be sure every syllable is in the right place.

Did she mean the deaths of all the people who died of Covid? Seventy-five percent. Or did she mean the people who died with Covid? The preposition, we have learned, matters muchly. “Of” means Covid is the murder weapon. “With” means Colonel Mustard did it with a poker in the library, and Covid was just standing in the corner. Listen carefully to the tape of Walensky on Good Morning America and it sounds like she means “with.” How many people actually died of Covid has been a dark CDC secret from early on.


OK. Seventy-five percent due to Colonel Mustard. Oops. Not just the Colonel. He has accomplices: Miss Scarlet with a candlestick, Professor Plum with a revolver, and Mrs. Peacock who is handy with a dagger. Together they are the “four comorbidities.” Like the Three Musketeers. Oops. That’s not quite right. The 75 percent of those who died hadat leastfour comorbidities. Some had five, six, maybe ten. We need all the characters from Clue and maybe more. Aunt Agnes with a flamethrower. Baby Bobby with a bamboo tube and a curare dart. And surely not all the casualties had the same four comorbidities. Inspector Hercule Poirot would at this point detrain the Orient Express and walk back to Brussels through the snow. The CDC has more than 15,000 personnel. It is mathematically possible that every single one of them was in the library when Blanche breathed her last.

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