New Zealand has had 1800 cases and 25 deaths so far.
Right, but you can’t compare New Zealand’s raw totals with that of the US, which has 66x more people. So I size-adjust, which is basically taking the country’s fatalities, dividing that by the country’s population, then multiplying it by the US population (about 329MM) to put everyone on US terms/on an equal footing.
Their leadership is crazed.
Okay, but did NZ give their hospitals an incentive to code all deaths covid-19 like the US/Medicare did?
Medicare paid the US hospitals $13,000 for each covid-19 cause of death. They also received $39,000 when a patient was put on a ventilator.
The covid death count in the USA was absolutely juiced by hospitals to increase revenue when they were being restricted to not having any elective surgeries. Hospital revenues were down substantially. You could not have heart procedures, knee replacements, etc.
So, changing a cardiac arrest death to covid-19 death was a $13,000 additional revenue to the hospital in a time when they needed the money.
Did other countries around the world have a similar incentive from their respective governments?
This incentive increased the covid-19 death statistics in the USA.