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"Most of the downplaying I've seen has revolved around the idea that those who died would have, "died anyway" from some other ailment or that hospitals are find
by timr 6y ago
"Most of the downplaying I've seen has revolved around the idea that those who died would have, "died anyway" from some other ailment or that hospitals are finding any reason they can to attribute deaths to covid."
The authors of this are doing exactly the same thing, but from the other direction:
> Given that there is insufficient evidence to estimate these contributions to excess mortality, for now we assume that total COVID-19 deaths equal excess mortality. For the reasons presented in this section, we believe that this is likely an underestimate.
This is all simply noise. The way we'll find out the answer to this question is when someone pulls the death certificates for 2020, and actually tabulates the percentage directly caused by Covid.
It will happen, but this work isn't it.
- altcognito 6y agoNo, because without tests, doctors didn’t uniformly attribute deaths correctly to covid, and often the official causes of death even in cases of cancer are often “pneumonia” or sepsis, or organ failure — the literal thing that killed them at the moment of death, not the cause of the symptom that overwhelmed the body.
- timr 6y agoYou are making an assumption that all (or even just the majority) of excess deaths are because of this. Moreover, we know that there are examples of the opposite: deaths where Covid was on the certificate as a contributing factor, but not the primary cause. These aren't hard to find. An 85 year-old with congestive heart failure and late-stage cancer and Covid reflects the modal situation here. It isn't some theoretical event -- it's incredibly common.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- pixl97 6y agoRight, and those happen at a pretty regular rate every year. If we suddenly have 50k+ more congestive heart failure cases, or 50k less, we can tell that in the statistics.
- timr 6y agoWell, sure. It will be good to get the actual data, and then we'll know. Right now, what we have is aggregate death counts (which we know are high), and people speculating that they're elevated because of Covid (or in this case, making models based on speculation).