The nice thing about looking at excess deaths is the specificity and finality of the metric. “Case” is problematic due to testing errors and sampling bias (and

The nice thing about looking at excess deaths is the specificity and finality of the metric. “Case” is problematic due to testing errors and sampling bias (and the fact that “case” in the medical sense generally means you are under a doctor’s care). “Hospitalization” may mean “with COVID”, to manage hospital resources for infection control, or “from COVID”, the popular interpretation to assess how serious the illness is and how quickly the serious illness is spreading. We can all agree on what death means. There is still the forensic issue of untangling how much COVID contributed, and that has been a focus of CDC work. But it’s a cleaner metric than most. Another post here gives the CDC site link, but here it is too (gives State-by-State info as well) https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm Might be nice to have a QALY-based assessment at autopsy...how many more good years would this person have had without the COVID-associated event? Admittedly a guess, but insightful nonetheless. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year