Coding for death is something that statisticians do all the time. They have established, well used, processes to assign death to a particular cause. Covid-19 c

Coding for death is something that statisticians do all the time. They have established, well used, processes to assign death to a particular cause. Covid-19 causes a range of severity of illness. If someone is hospitalised for covid-19 they are very unwell -- this is because hospitals are overwhelmed by the number of patients and are only admitting those who are very ill, and also because hospitals want infectious people to stay at home out of hospital as long as possible to reduce the amount of infection being spread. So, when someone with covid-19 dies in hospital it's almost certain that it's the covid-19 that killed them, even if they would have died later that year of something else.