ICD-10 is really the heart of the matter. Earlier recommendations have asked doctors to encode corona death information using Pneumonia (J12.89) or Bronchitis (J20.8, J40) if positive test results are available, suffixed by B97.29 if authorized by the CDC to do so. We now appear to finally have the pneumonia encoded info thanks to NCHS. Hopefully govt will open source the bronchitis encoded reports too.
We don't know yet. These numbers are still preliminary, but it helps us to understand better the impact of the workarounds that doctors have needed to use, to tell the CDC it's COVID, when the software does not yet have a button for COVID.
The good news from the recent report (https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-Death-Counts-for-Coron...) is that overall mortality in America these past few months, has actually been lower than previous years. The bad news is that we should prepare for the possibilty that mortality for the new coronavirus specifically could turn out to be much worse than many non-official sources online have speculated, and that what's happening in NYC is happening in a lot more places too. Correcting for software workarounds and verifying good accurate data takes time.
> Before anyone goes collecting sewage samples, consider deriving your scaling factors from discrepencies in ICD-10 diagnostic encoding practices.
Did I understand correctly that there was two diagnostic codes for cause of death related to the coronavirus? One for "potentially related" to COVID-19, and one for "definitively caused by" COVID-19?
If so, how would this skew actual numbers reported by the WHO or CDC for cause of death?