What he is describing was not even a secret. I remember seeing a clip from a White House press conference where Dr. Birx confirmed that the US policy will be exactly what this doctor is describing when counting COVID-19 deaths. I believe it was to have a simple, consistent method of counting across the US, but it clearly lead to inflated numbers that counted deaths by other causes as COVID deaths.
Here is a on it from April 7, 2020.
edit: They did do something dishonest though. They incentivised hospitals to test everyone who came in. The PCR tests were done with a high cycle threshold, which gave lots of false positives. That means a lot of people who had no COVID-19 symptoms, or were not even infected, still tested positive and were recorded as a COVID-19 death.
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