[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.