We mustn't forget the stupidity of the past few years.

One of the finest examples of the delusional psychosis of the covid era.

I found this article in the UK’s Independent newspaper so utterly unbelievably stupid I just had to share it.

Just in case this ever gets removed, let the record state that the text of this article reads as follows.

The body of a Ukrainian man who died from drowning in Italy tested positive for Covid-19 as many as 28 times in the six weeks after his death, according to scientists who examined his corpse.

The 41-year-old went missing while swimming at sea with his friends during rough weather near the Italian city of Chieti. His body was found wedged between rocks 16 hours later, according to the study published in the Journal of Medicine Case.

The man was believed to be asymptomatic before his death. However, during a routine Covid test of the corpse as part of his autopsy, the swab result turned out to be positive, according to scientists of Italy’s D’Annunzio University.

Over a period of 41 days, 28 tests were carried out on the corpse, and they all turned out to be positive. The man’s body was kept at 4C in the morgue at Chieti Hospital inside a sealed waterproof bag.

While there is limited data on the transmission of infection from a corpse, this is a rare case that is shedding light on how long the Covid-19 infection can persist in a body even after the person is dead.

“The present case shows the persistence of SARS-CoV-2 RNA up to 41 days after death,” the researchers from the university’s Center for Advanced Studies and Technology wrote.

“Data about its persistence are of fundamental importance for pathologists to understand when the handling of the corpse is safe, and further studies are needed to estimate the virus contagiousness.”

More tests could not be performed due to the man’s burial after 41 days.

However, scientists warned that the case reflects the “importance of postmortem swabs in all autopsy cases, and not only in potential severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2-related death.”

They also emphasised the need to evaluate virus positivity a long time after the moment of death, even if a low initial viral load was assessed.

A few updates:

I really should have pointed out that the newspaper article was based a real, “peer-reviewed” academic journal article.

(Thank you to

Dr. Flurm Googlybean

for pointing this out in a comment below.)

Vapid stupidity can possibly be excused by journalists, but this paper made it through “peer-review” without any comments at all other than minor typos.

Reviewers were unanimous in judging that paper made “a useful contribution to the medical literature”, with one considering it to be “an exceptional article”.

Thanks also to

Ursula Edgington, PhD

for the example she gave of someone being shot in NZ and classed as a covid death.

Amusing though this is, the report contains one interesting and disturbing nugget about the way people were thinking (and still are:)

We will be now publicly reporting confirmed deaths as those where the death documents or an investigation has shown that the cause was Covid-19 and we will report other deaths where the cause of death is not certain but the person has Covid-19.

The implication of this is that if there’s a positive test, a person’s death was either caused by covid or the covid was incidental - but they definitely “had covid”.

So positive molecular test = having a disease.

This goes against everything I was taught at medical school - where it was drummed into us that even well-established test results do not a diagnosis make, for which the starting point was symptoms, history and examination.