[phakding]

Ok, NY counted some that they shouldn't have. There's a vast majority of the country other than NYC that is affected by the virus and vast rest of the world too. You decided to nitpick one example and made it sound like a pattern.

[megavolcano]

Paraphrasing Dr. Birx: "There are other countries that if you had a pre-existing condition, and let's say the virus caused you to go to the ICU and then have a heart or kidney problem, some countries are recording that as a heart issue or a kidney issue and not a COVID-19 death. The intent is ... if someone dies with COVID-19 we are counting that."

Paraphrasing mostly, but this is Dr. Birx admitting that the government is overreporting by default. So even if you exclude NYC, it doesn't change my point.

[phakding]

That's how that works. Take for example, HIV. Nobody dies of HIV, but because HIV causes immunodeficiency, you can die because of common cold or flu. That doesn't mean the person died because of common cold, they died because of HIV/AIDS.

Similarly if you have type 1 diabetes and you get infected with corona, you probably died with diabetic complications, but without corona you would have been totally fine.

Not sure how that doesn't change your point. In fact you are conflating two different things. On one hand you are arguing about overreporting and on the other hand don't even want to take into consideration common practices in disease statistics. Almost makes me think you are not arguing in good faith.

[megavolcano]

People aren't catching type 1 diabetes because they are sick by coronavirus - they already had it. Comparing it to an immunodeficiency disease is not the same. It makes zero sense to generalize the fatality rate across a healthy population and include those with pre-existing conditions when trying to gauge the response for an entire state/country when the vast majority are healthy and those who are dying are not. When I want to know the risk to me or my family, I don't care that an 81 year old with stage 4 lung cancer died when he got COVID-19 - I want to know what my chances are among healthy people - but the media hysterics cling to the vulnerable people when it has no bearing on healthy ones.

We need detailed demographics of infections and deaths. We need to break down the risks, because a blanket totalitarian response of "SHUT DOWN LITERALLY EVERYTHING" is absolutely ridiculous when the general population is going to be fine. We didn't shut down the world economy for SARS, H1N1, MERS or any particularly bad flu season and we shouldn't shut down for this. We should focus our limited resources on protecting the vulnerable and let everyone else get back to work. More lives will be destroyed from an extended shutdown than this virus ever could.

[pacala]

FWIW, that's the exact same point I made in the GP, with s/HIV/old age/ and s/flu/covid/.