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It is far from perfect; and yet, it's the only metric comparable between different countries, assuming you can trust death counts -- which I do for most countri
by beagle3 5y ago
It is far from perfect; and yet, it's the only metric comparable between different countries, assuming you can trust death counts -- which I do for most countries. It's not a good proxy, but there is no better one that I've found (nor that I'm aware anyone else has found).
Every other measure has all of the problems you listed, and in addition it is subject to testing policy differences (including who to test, cycle threshold, and other variables), diagnostic policy differences (e.g., in the UK, death within 28 days of a positive PCR test is classified as death from corona, regardless of what happened since; Death more than 24 hours from a vaccine is assumed unrelated to the vaccine), and explicit number fudging.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> it’s the only metric comparable between different countries There are a near infinite array of othere measures besides exceess deaths that are both comparable between countries and not, even approximately, measuring the thing being discussed, which is COVID infections, like GDP per capita PPP.
- beagle3 5y agoNot sure what you are trying to say here. Let's try again. Are you aware of any other metric for covid infection, comparable between different countries? Please pay attention to the examples I already gave about how numbers from Israel and the UK make, specifically, "cases" and "deaths from covid" non-comparable. And remember that I do not dispute that "excess death" is far from perfect. My claim is that -- inherently -- every other measure of covid infection suffers from the same problems that "excess death" does, and then some.