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by refurb 743 days ago
It’s amazing how often you find out the differences in metrics are due to how data is collected not due to actual differences.

I read a good paper(1) about newborn deaths rates in Cuba. It’s often touted that Cuba has amazingly low newborn death rates which obvious means communism has far better healthcare than capitalist systems.

Turns out it’s a reporting artifact. If you correct for it, they have the same death rate as other Central American countries with similar GDP per capita.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6681443/
1 comments
throwawayqqq11 743 days ago
Can you please explain the different data collection of norway to reach almost zero?

I just finished this comment before reading yours.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40607378

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refurb 743 days ago
It's explained in another comment. The US tracks it by asking "is this person who died, pregnant?". If the answer is yes, then it's a "maternal death".

Norway only counts pregnant women who died because of their pregnancy.

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throwawayqqq11 743 days ago
This implies the US data collection does not gather cause of death, with which a normalization before comparison would be harder.

Ill check now for this and edit this comment.

Edit:

> https://www.cdc.gov/maternal-mortality/php/data-research/?CD...

> Among the 525 pregnancy-related deaths, an underlying cause of death was identified for 511 deaths. In 2020, the six most frequent underlying causes of pregnancy-related death—mental health conditions, cardiovascular conditions, infection, hemorrhage, embolism, hypertensive disorders of pregnancy—accounted for over 82% of pregnancy-related deaths (Table 4).

> Among the 525 pregnancy-related deaths, a preventability determination was made for 515 deaths. Among these, 430 (84%) were determined to be preventable (Table 6).

This shows they didnt just take a yes\no for pregancy and +1ed the statistic, like you suggested. They reasoned about the causality and preventability.

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refurb 742 days ago
> This shows they didnt just take a yes\no for pregancy and +1ed the statistic, like you suggested.

I didn't suggest that.

What I said was how numbers were reported. The US reports all deaths in pregnant women, regardless of cause. Norways only reports maternal deaths when the cause is pregnancy complications.

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