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Please note that this is the official tally, and not the likely real answer. According to the NY Times in https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/08/12/us/cov
by btilly 6y ago
Please note that this is the official tally, and not the likely real answer.
According to the NY Times in https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/08/12/us/covid-deaths-us.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/08/12/us/covid-deat... we likely passed 200k dead by mid-August. And since then we've become even more parsimonious about who we count as dead of COVID-19.
An example of a problem counting this is co-morbidities - if you have heart problems and COVID-19 (even if it was apparently asymptomatic), the odds that your heart problems kill you goes up. If you die from a heart attack, should you be counted as COVID-19? Maybe you would have died without COVID-19, maybe not. And depending where you die, maybe you would be counted as a COVID-19 death, and maybe not. So there is both an over and under count going on.
But based on excess mortalities, it is likely that COVID-19 is being undercounted a lot more than it is overcounted.
- DuskStar 6y ago> But based on excess mortalities, it is likely that COVID-19 is being undercounted a lot more than it is overcounted. Unless lockdowns are rather bad for one's health, you mean.
- btilly 6y agoI am not aware of any definitive evidence either way on whether lockdowns are good or bad for physical health. They are clearly bad for people's mental health (except adolescents) and are horrible for the economy. However for physical health we have a variety of effects. Positive ones include reduced car accidents and communicable diseases of all kinds. Negative ones include more suicides and less preventive care. I don't know how they balance out. Do you have any data on that?
- DuskStar 6y agoI don't think anyone does yet, and there's still the massive confounder of 'covid'. But it's hard to say for sure that excess deaths above normal beyond what are reported to be from covid are missed cases, when we don't know the size of other effects.
- btilly 6y agoIt is hard to say for sure that ALL excess deaths above normal are COVID-19. But it is extremely likely that there are a lot of excess deaths that are. Even though we don't know the actual breakdown.