The campaign to scare the world into adopting unprecedented abridgments of civil liberties to fight a purported pandemic that threatened unthinkable levels of casualties had a lot of help from the officials charged with counting the death toll.  Most readers of American Thinker are familiar with anecdotes such as the motorcyclist who died in a crash but was counted as a "COVID death" because he had a positive test for antibodies.  An audit by two Minnesota state legislators late last year estimated that COVID deaths in that state were overcounted by about 40%.  But, on the other hand, an audit in Kentucky last March added about 10% to that state's death toll allegedly due to COVID.  And an audit this month in India has added substantially to the death toll in the northern state of Bihar.

Now comes news, via America's Frontline Doctors, of an actual judicial decision on the true extent of COVID deaths in Portugal.  Mordechai Sones writes:

Following a citizen's petition, a Lisbon court was forced to provide verified COVID-19 mortality data, reports AndreDias.net.

According to the ruling, the number of verified COVID-19 deaths from January 2020 to April 2021 is only 152, not about 17,000 as claimed by government ministries.

All the "others" died for various reasons, although their PCR test was positive.