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It isn't as crazy as you might think depending on how far you want to take it. My charitable interpretation of the comment you're replying to is that they belie
by throwawaysea 5y ago
It isn't as crazy as you might think depending on how far you want to take it. My charitable interpretation of the comment you're replying to is that they believe COVID is real and does cause deaths, but that the number of deaths is not as high as what is claimed.
As an example of why that isn't "crazy", consider that recently a major Bay Area county in CA revised their COVID counts downward by 25% (https://www.foxnews.com/health/california-county-cuts-covid-death-toll https://www.foxnews.com/health/california-county-cuts-covid-...) because they had previously included deaths of anyone infected with the virus, regardless of whether the virus was a direct or contributing cause to the death. This is in a state that took the pandemic very seriously, had lots of governmental organization around it, and 'believes in science'.
People have been raising concerns about how deaths are counted throughout the pandemic, but they've largely been ignored, despite it being a legitimate line of questioning. They were always told "there are standards", which isn't really a convincing argument, given that there have been a non-zero number of proven instances of over-counting. You could argue that excess mortality is the metric we should look at, and that may be appropriate in some countries where such data collection is rigorous. But the way excess mortality is tracked is also inconsistent between different nations, and outright non-existent in most nations.
- mikeyouse 5y agoNo, it's still crazy. Data quality is the reason I only stuck to the US figures. The "Official" death count due to covid in the US so far is 586,000. Excess mortality indicates 680,000. Believing that "the real" number is somewhere substantially below that is not "skeptical" it's just silly.