With the report he commissioned, Rokita sought to prove his skepticism right. His key findings included what he called “vastly inflated” death counts. People who had died from drownings, automobile deaths, and overdoses, for instance, were listed as Covid-19 deaths, even though the virus wasn’t the cause. The Indiana Department of Health overreported those deaths by 10.9 percent in 2020; 7 percent in 2021; and 12.5 percent in 2022, he said. The state also never accounted for deaths that occurred as a result of its lockdown policies.
Rokita also discovered what he said were “unsound” Covid-19 positivity rates. That figure, he said, “soared over 30 percent during several months of 2020,” but his analysis from several studies found that the state’s positivity rate was under 5 percent throughout 2020. He blamed the errors on counting every test as a separate case (although one sick patient often tested several times) and the failure to do randomly selected testing.