[zionic]

>Just line up the number of people who died / got sick of non-COVID19 diseases in 2020

This is _extremely_ difficult to do, as a mix of both incentive structures and poor policy lead to any death with a positive PCR test being counted as a COVID death.

It's practically impossible now to go back and figure out how many were _actually_ "killed by COVID" vs "died _with_ COVID".

[dragontamer]

> It's practically impossible now to go back and figure out how many were _actually_ "killed by COVID" vs "died _with_ COVID".

Have you ever read a death certificate?

They don't even read "killed by COVID19". The direct cause of death is _NEVER_ COVID19.

https://dphhs.mt.gov/vitalrecords/certificationofcovid-19

COVID19 doesn't even play a role until 2 or 3 lines later. Doctors write down "Killed by X" which was caused by "Y" which was caused by "Z". COVID19 is never "X", its always Y, Z, or later.

---------

Because we have these statistics, we can correlate "X" causes. If "X" is "blunt force trauma to the head", it is unlikely that "Y" or "Z" will be COVID19.

But don't take my word for it. There's plenty of death certificates, and such data has been coallated together.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7014e2.htm

See Table 2 in this list, as an example. You can see that the immediate cause of death for most COVID19 patients is Pneumonia, unspecified (J18.9), followed by Acute respiratory failure (J96.0).

Which of these ICD codes do you think is being misclassified as a COVID19 death? Please be specific. Any such large scale misclassification would be obviously in the data here.

[peter422]

Most people who had covid and died probably wouldn’t have died so quickly if they didn’t have covid.

Why you do the mental gymnastics to pretend this isn’t true is so baffling.

[autoexec]

You're right. At one point I read it was as high as 10 years that the average person who died of covid could have otherwise lived on for. I suspect that number has changed a few times over the pandemic, but even a few years more years with a loved one is priceless, losing anything close to a decade would be a massive loss.

[spookthesunset]

I’m sure George Floyd would have lived a little longer if he wasn’t Covid positive when he died.

It doesn’t matter anyway. The data required to support our mitigations stopped mattering a long long time ago. ..Sometime back when the “4% kill rate” predicted by the imperial college paper turned out to be very very wrong and when all those temporary military hospital things got closed because they weren’t being used. That might have been a good time to reevaluate what the fuck we were doing but instead of celebrating the fact that Covid wasn’t nearly as bad as predicted we just doubled down for a year and a half more instead.

Honestly it’s best to just take the numbers at face value and assume any overcount is balanced by undercounts.

[dragontamer]

> I’m sure George Floyd would have lived a little longer if he wasn’t Covid positive when he died.

George Floyd tested positive for COVID19 before he died, but its not listed in his cause of death.

Is that really the best counterexample you've got of an improper death certificate?

https://storage.googleapis.com/afs-prod/media/711012da318e49...

There's not even any COVID19 listed on here.

[peter422]

I said most, not all.

If 95% of people died from covid, and 5% died with covid, then basically for all intents and purposes and how we use this data, the distinction is irrelevant.

[spookthesunset]

I agree. I just take the numbers at face value. Trying to suggest they are under or over counted is a fools errand. It will take decades of distance from this event for cooler heads to tally up what really happened.

[jat850]

> It's practically impossible now to go back and figure out how many were _actually_ "killed by COVID" vs "died _with_ COVID".

No, it's not. Which is why some health regions are going back and doing exactly this, to reflect the distinction.