[e98cuenc]

You are right strictly speaking, but misleading. In the vast majority of cases of people dying with COVID-19 from another condition, COVID-19 is the reason why this other condition became lethal. That's why it makes sense to attribute the death to COVID-19.

[guscost]

That’s just the absurd example. How do you call it when someone dies five minutes early because they got a stuffy nose? How about a day early? A year early?

The coroner is supposed to make these judgements, and it’s not entirely clear how you should aggregate them into a big-number statistic. If you go by official cause of death, nobody dies of a cold in most countries. If you go by a positive test, loads of people do.

[s9w]

That is quite a claim