This is strongly reminiscent of https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nidhiprakash/coronaviru... that anecdotally reported that COVID deaths are being severely underreported in the USA because doctors were told to only test if it would change the care given because tests were in short supply. But that means that if the person goes on to die, they are not actually counted as a case.
Governments the world over have made repeated, clear statements that if someone tests positive for COVID, and then dies within 28 days for any reason, the death is counted as a COVID death.
That is the end of any validity in test-derived deaths data.
I am sourcing my opinion exclusively from published, peer-reviewed science in well-established journals. If you are not aware of any of it, as it appears you just admitted, you are not a sufficiently qualified researcher and should refrain from comment.
> And if you were already say very very old or with comorbidities,
> and you die of pneumonia with a positive COVID test, then maybe you
> would have died anyway in a couple months, but still the immediate cause of
> death is COVID and nothing else makes sense.
I 100% agree if we go by what is written on their death certificate.
But...
For example in state of Massachusetts the COVID death definition includes anyone who has COVID listed as a cause of death on their death certificate, and any individual who has had a COVID-19 diagnosis within 60 days but does not have COVID listed as a cause of death on their death certificate [1].
CDC guidelines [2] are 100% clear but the problem is that we started counting also people which do not have COVID listed in certificate signed by doctor. I do not know - kinda crap.
The California rules are kinda interesting also [3]:
• The decedent had confirmatory laboratory evidence for SARS-CoV-2
(i.e. detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in a clinical or autopsy specimen
using a molecular amplification test) AND at least ONE of the following
criteria is met:
- A case investigation determined that COVID-19 was the cause
of death or contributed to the death.
- The death certificate indicates COVID-19 or an equivalent term
as one of the causes of death, regardless of the time elapsed
since specimen collection of the confirmatory laboratory test
used to define the case.
- The death occurred within 30 days of specimen collection for
the confirmatory laboratory test used to define the case and
was due to natural causes
In other words, if somebody dies within 30 days of being tested for COVID and death was due to natural causes then the death is counted as COVID death. Even if it is not on the death certificate.
You are a liar. Covid deaths have been overeported by the CDCs and NHS own admission, if you die while infected you get counted as covid death even if you had mere hours to live from terminal cancer but tested positive. PCR test lost its approval because it cannot tell the dif between cv and flu. Look it up yourselves off of censored google.
> Then there is the problem of deaths being attributed to covid any time the person who died has a positive covid test in the month prior to their death. It's easy to find numerous examples of people who died in car crashes or from suicide being reported as covid deaths, even still.
I never understood the reasoning behind this. I understand that pinpointing the cause of death is hard, especially with overcrowded hospitals, but I'm guessing that any doctor could circle the "high or low probability of covid causing the death" on the forms after the death of the patient. Covid+pneumonia, intubation, heart failure... sure, it's 99% it really was covid and not an unrelated undiscovered heart issue. Car crash... pretty sure it wasnt directly covids fault. The suicides would be a bit more touchy though.
> If you have heart issues and you die due to a heart attack you're not counted as a COVID death
That doesn't seem to be the case - a man from Baden-Württemberg, who died earlier this month, was only tested positive AFTER he was already dead for a few days and counted towards the statistic.
a family member who is a doctor at a hospital told me that any patient that dies of a respiratory illness is being marked as covid19 even if they were never tested for it. dead truly means dead. dead by covid19 does not.
Come on, it's been a year and a half now. Why are people still making these tired points which have been discounted all over
We all know with covid doesn't always mean because of covid, but it's statistically significant enough that dying shortly after covid gives a pretty damn good representation of the infection rate. It's statistically unlikely that you die from unrelated causes within 28 days of a positive covid test
This was already explained upthread: "the death count is exaggerated because the criteria for a Covid death is that a person is dead and also tests positive for Covid regardless of how the person really died."
> thought numbers were being artificially inflated was that they were counting people who died while having tested positive for covid being attributed to covid
This objectively happened. Anyone who was COVID positive was being counted as a COVID death. It happened to my friend's dad- COVID was listed as the cause of death on his death certificate, v even though it was nothing to do with any illness at all, but rather an accident.
This practice varied by state and tracking eventually broke out death with COVID vs death by COVID.
This is so tiresome. Someone has cancer for six months, gets COVID and dies 17 days later and now Tucker Carlson is here telling me not to count that death. How often do you really think it happens that someone is hospitalized with COVID (otherwise, they'd not even be getting tested most places in the world) and dies of something else a week later? I'm sure it has happened a few times, but what has also been happening hundreds of times every day is people die untested and are not included in the official numbers. Its ridiculous to even have this discussion, and the motivations for it are absolutely disgusting.
> I have no opinion on this but I have read multiple times now that currently if someone dies, say on Heart Disease, and has positively tested on Covid-19, that the death cause is counted as Covid-19.
You have read incorrect information. Only deaths "where the disease caused or is assumed to have caused or contributed to death" [1].
Of course, there will be errors. As with any number, especially one reported daily.
BTW: there are also reasons for COVID deaths being underreported, so the bias in the number isn't really one way.
That 733 number is fake. It's all extremely exaggerated. Someone dies from a heart attack and they will flag it as a COVID death if any trace was detected with test equipment that is ridiculously overtuned to detect even non-infectious trace particles of the virus.
> A positive test is not even necessary to report them as Covid-19 deaths in the US.
But this applies to other forms of death. We count flu deaths in the same way, so the data is equally skewed.
> > > COVID-19 should be reported on the death certificate for all decedents where the disease caused or is assumed to have caused or contributed to death.
People can only put it on the death certificate if they can make that assumption to the best of their knowledge or belief. It's not doctors guessing.
Dead are all tested... when dead. If coronavirus accelerates the passing away of chronically ill or severely ill people, would you count that as a covid death? Italy does, that’s the point. And it is not influenza, please stop that, the particular pneumonia associated with covid is viral instead of bacterial, and there is no antibiotic for that, only drugs (experimental, allowed for compassionate use) mitigating the quick and deadly inflammation effects.
No amount of Hacker News Mental Gymnastics(tm) is going to explain that away.
[1]:https://twitter.com/BraveTheWorld/status/1254232498122428416
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