[Zacru]

My guess is because it's kind of misrepresenting the data. While it's technically true, most of those co-morbitities were things like respiratory failure or pneumonia. So while it's not an outright lie, it's also not a particularly insightful bit of information when presented without further explanation.

[adammichaelc]

I don't understand how it's misrepresenting the data. :)

94% of COVID deaths had comorbidities, often serious. The average number of comorbidities is more than 2.

Can you clarify how this is misrepresenting the data?

[Zacru]

>had co-morbidities, meaning other things that they also died from other than Covid 19

First, that is not what comorbidity means. From Wikipedia[0]: >In medicine, comorbidity is the presence of one or more additional conditions often co-occurring with a primary condition.

Second, most of the listed comorbidities that are significant factors for death are actually complications due to COVID-19. The number of people who die of spontaneous respiratory failure is basically zero.

>So the actual increase in deaths from 2019 to 2020 will probably be significantly lower than 3%.

This is assuming the other comorbidities would have lead to death in the absence of COVID-19. But that is not a reasonable assumption based on the CDC data. There are many kinds of comorbidities that people live with that don't usually cause sudden death. So if they didn't have COVID-19, they would almost certainly still be alive at the end of the year.

Since your conclusion doesn't follow from the data, claiming the data supports your conclusion is necessarily misrepresenting it.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comorbidity

[Zacru]

Sorry, I confused you and the author of the comment you replied to.