[DrNuke]

The quick answer is any emerged, severe case or death with the suspected presence of bilateral interstitial pneumonia (which symptoms are now well known globally) is registered as a covid case. It is fair enough when hospitals are out of capacity and people just die at home. The underlying point is Lombardy is suspected to have x5-x10 active circulating covid cases, which would put mortality at the same and more coherent, global rate. The fact that co-morbidity cases are all put into the same coronavirus basket is what makes numbers so high, but please consider these are all people who would not die today without coronavirus, and there is really no allowed time or resources to make better classification when more and more cases come knocking at the door daily.

[easytiger]

> The quick answer is any emerged, severe case or death with the suspected presence of bilateral interstitial pneumonia (which symptoms are now well known globally) is registered as a covid case.

It's not really acceptable in a country than loses between 8-24k people a year to influenza strains anyway.

Are you sure this is true? Another post claims all dead are tested.

[nirse]

> It's not really acceptable

I think using these kind of terms is unwise in these troubled days, unless you are a professional in the relavant field, and if you are, Hackernews isn't the platform for the discussion.

An epidemiologist friend explained various things to me the other day: 1. hardly anyone dies OF covid-19 (cause of death on death certificate), people die WITH covid-19 (in which case it would still be mentioned somewhere on the death certificate). 2. A great many different statistics are generally gathered, but these are complex and need a lot of knowledge to interpret. These would include cases where Covid-19 was suspected to be involved, confirmed to be involved, prime cause of death (which is very rare, according to my friend). In the end, the general public is presented with a single number which indeed doesn't tell the whole story, but at least gives some indication of the situation.

[DrNuke]

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.

[easytiger]

I see your point.

Italy always fares poorly year on year on flu seasons

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S120197121...

> We estimated excess deaths of 7,027, 20,259, 15,801 and 24,981 attributable to influenza epidemics in the 2013/14, 2014/15, 2015/16

> And it is not influenza, please stop that,

I never asserted that it was, if you read the comment you will see that I was asserting that they usually fare poorly in influenza seasonal outbreaks. For the same reasons it's faring poorly with cv19