NEW ANALYSIS: CRITICAL ERRORS IN COVID DEATH TOLL

An analysis intending to get a more accurate reading of COVID’s fatality rate by a Johns Hopkins University statistics expert was published, then removed by the university’s student newspaper.
After reviewing death statistics from various diseases as compiled by the CDC, Dr. Genevieve Briand, assistant program director of the Applied Economics master’s degree program at Johns Hopkins, stated her finding:
“All of this points to no evidence that COVID-19 created any excess deaths. Total death numbers are not above normal death numbers. We found no evidence to the contrary.”
The Johns Hopkins News-Letter wrote the following:
“After retrieving data on the CDC website, Dr. Briand compiled a graph representing percentages of total deaths per age category… which includes the period from before COVID-19 was detected in the U.S. to after infection rates soared. Surprisingly, the deaths of older people stayed the same before and after COVID-19. Since COVID-19 mainly affects the elderly, experts expected an increase in the percentage of deaths in older age groups. However, this increase is not seen from the CDC data. In fact, the percentages of deaths among all age groups remain relatively the same.”
And yet, while the editors did not challenge the accuracy of the analysis, they decided to remove it, with this explanation:
“After The News-Letter published this article on 22 November, it was brought to our attention that our coverage of Genevieve Briand’s presentation, “COVID-19 Deaths: A Look at U.S. Data,” has been used to support dangerous inaccuracies that minimize the impact of the pandemic…however, it is our responsibility as journalists to provide a historical record. We have chosen to take down the article from our website, but it is available here as a PDF.”
Click here for a link to the article. 
Key Stat: No “Excess Deaths”
Dr. Briand’s study was reviewed on 26 November by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), the group behind The Great Barrington Declaration (reported on in a number of Trends Research issues, including this one.)  
According to the AIER article, the data known as “excess deaths” is crucial to understanding the overblown COVID-19 death count. It quotes the CDC:
“Estimates of excess deaths can provide information about the burden of mortality potentially related to the COVID-19 pandemic, including deaths that are directly or indirectly attributed to COVID-19. Excess deaths are typically defined as the difference between the observed numbers of deaths in specific time periods and expected numbers of deaths in the same time periods.”
As the AIEE article states, “Essentially, there is an average number of deaths every year due to a variety of causes that for the most part have remained constant through the years. This includes morbidities such as heart disease, which has long been the leading cause of death, and cancer, which has long plagued our existence. For Covid-19 to be a serious cause of alarm, it would need to significantly increase the number of average deaths.” 
Here is the graph taken from the CDC website, used in Dr. Briand’s study. Note the decrease in comorbidities as COVID-19 spread last April. Except for the last one:

In the interview with the Johns Hopkins News-Letter, which was later removed, Dr. Briand made clear why COVID-19 death rates were overstated: 
“If the COVID-19 death toll was not misleading at all, what we should have observed is an increased number of heart attacks and increased COVID-19 numbers. But a decreased number of heart attacks and all the other death causes doesn’t give us a choice but to point to some misclassification.”
The article describing the study on the AIEE website states,
“This new study notes some critical accounting errors done at the national level. The study – which is still being vetted – simply examines the raw data that should have been questioned months ago. The overall conclusion is that COVID-19, at least according to collected data, is not the killer disease that it is currently hyped up to be. AIER is not endorsing the study as is without further study, but we are interested in the argument being examined and discussed.”
TRENDPOST: To be clear, the CDC stats above show a decrease from the average number of deaths from heart diseases, but an increase in COVID heart diseases. Why would the average rate of heart diseases go down during the spread of COVID? According to Dr. Briand, likely because of “misclassification,” i.e., being incorrectly counted as being caused by COVID.