A 60-year-old man who died from a gun shot wound to the head.

A 90-year-old man who fell and died from complications of a hip fracture.

A 77-year-old woman who died of Parkinson’s disease.

These are some of the deaths in Palm Beach County recently, and incorrectly, attributed to COVID-19 in medical examiner records.

The CBS12 News I-Team uncovered several examples in Medical Examiner reports of people counted as a COVID death who did not die of COVID.

We requested a list of all COVID-19 deaths in Palm Beach County from the Medical Examiner’s office and received a spread sheet of 581 cases.

Each person on the spreadsheet is someone who tested positive for COVID-19.

In each case line, the person’s cause of death and contributing causes of death are listed, if there are any.

Somber, but unhysterical, evidence-based assessment, reveals that Florida’s uptick in COVID-19 mortality, beginning June 30-July 1, peaked over the next three weeks through July 20. Mercifully, the state’s COVID-19 death rate has been in slow decline since then.

Grisly milestones were reached on July 16 and 17. The maximum number of deaths recorded by date of death determination — i.e., specifically, 12 a.m. to 11:59 p.m. on each of those days — equaled 151, and 152, respectively.

Breathlessly distorted — and invalid — “death by date of report” recording (“ >250” on July 30) dominates the news cycles. Such coverage greatly exaggerates the morbid enough daily Florida COVID-19 death tolls by actual date of death, and their now reassuring downward trajectory.

Recording COVID-19 death by “date of report,” not true date of death — as The Atlantic magazine’s agenda-driven Covid Tracking Project ( CTP) records for states like Florida (and other “hot spots”) — has no biological, or epidemiological meaning. Deaths for specific individuals occur on specific days, not some arbitrary range of days, which can date back weeks to months, depending on the data harvest.

Moreover, those deaths must not be “pooled” and then reported on some whimsical date, which differs from the actual dates of death. Doing so renders both the y-axis — for number of deaths — and the x-axis — for specific date, meaningless, when plotting a death curve, so one can gauge whether the mortality rate from an infectious disease outbreak is increasing, decreasing, or staying the same.

The warped “COVID-19 death reports” of The Atlantic’s CTP are regurgitated uncritically by major national media (see an example from Forbes, July 29, “according to data from The COVID Tracking Project.”). This gins up COVID-19 hysteria, even as the outbreak’s mortality is past its apex in a “hot spot” like Florida.