> Calling them coronavirus deaths and then turning around and using the size of that number as an reason to continue lockdown would be foolhardy at best. Sure,

> Calling them coronavirus deaths and then turning around and using the size of that number as an reason to continue lockdown would be foolhardy at best. Sure, but I don't think anybody serious is doing that. Obviously people are considering things like this in their models. But the total number of coronavirus deaths is still useful when trying to measure the effect of a failure to contain the virus. So for example when you want to compare countries/states that locked down early and effectively to countries/states that waited too long, saw a massive spike in deaths and then had to lock down even harder. In that case you don't really care what caused the deaths, you just care about the fact that it appears that you could have avoided them with better policy.