4 ms·

While I'm sure there is some mis-classification of causes of death, note that often there is not a single clear cause of death. Specifically, someone with term

While I'm sure there is some mis-classification of causes of death, note that often there is not a single clear cause of death. Specifically, someone with terminal cancer might still die to Covid. Or the cancer (and treatments) might have weakened them enough that they were more susceptible to Covid. In that case: did they die from Covid or cancer? In a sense both. A story from your barber is not only anecdotal, it is quite possibly based on misunderstanding - especially if the barber is inclined to distrust Government. In general, there is reason to believe undercounting Covid is more of a problem than overcounting. I just read that in India there may have been 6 times as many Covid deaths than officially reported. To really estimate Covid fatalities it is not enough to count reported Covid deaths, you also need to look at other numbers - specifically "excess mortality": How many people have died in the last 2 years compared to in "normal" years? See https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid . These numbers suggest that official numbers are if anything undercounting Covid deaths, even in the US (which has good reporting in detahs in general), and multiple times undercounted worldwide. True, a few of the excess deaths are likely indirect rather than from Covid itself: Work-from-home leading to less traffic leading to more speeding leading to more traffic fatalities. People not getting or delaying needed medical care because of full hospitals - or just fear of getting infected. Homeless people freezing to death because they fear shelters (or shelter capacity being reduced). And so on. I'll leave it to experts to try to estimate these effects. Regardless, Covid has killed a lot of people, and arguing that the "mass media" is deliberately exaggerating the danger is plain disinformation and wishful thinking.

JPKab 5y ago
> A story from your barber is not only anecdotal, it is quite possibly based on misunderstanding - especially if the barber is inclined to distrust Government. My barber is a young, apolitical Latina. And please explain to me how the family "misunderstood" a death certificate saying she died of COVID, contacted the hospital, the hospital looked into it, and agreed it was an error and fixed it... This is a straightforward chain of events. > To really estimate Covid fatalities it is not enough to count reported Covid deaths, you also need to look at other numbers - specifically "excess mortality": How many people have died in the last 2 years compared to in "normal" years? How do you separate out the vastly increased number of deaths from diseases of despair like addiction? What about people like my mother-in-law, who went into cardiac arrest hours after her second shot due to a rare adverse event? She was in the midst of a fever. (The hospital, understandably overwhelmed by covid cases, inadvertently forgot to report her death to VAERS, despite the team of cardiologists recommending they do so.) Every single hospital in the US has a huge financial incentive to test for covid, which was deliberate to prevent the undercounting you are talking about. It's clear that the incentives are biased towards over counting, with the CDC admitting a few days ago that they are working on getting separate numbers for "hospitalized for covid/hospitalized with covid". > arguing that the "mass media" is deliberately exaggerating the danger is plain disinformation and wishful thinking. Mass media has absolutely obfuscated the stratification of risk by age. This indirectly results in most members of the public dramatically overestimating their personal risk. This is obvious, but also documented quantitatively by Gallup. It's not a small overestimation either, but orders of magnitude. You may be one of these people for all I know. Someone is responsible for the public being grossly misinformed on this topic. I think it's the media combined with CDC, but perhaps you have other ideas. From Gallup: https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimates-covid-hospitalization-risk.aspx https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimat... "Previous Gallup research has found that the American public has a poor understanding of the true risks associated with the COVID-19 pandemic and that misperceptions vary by political party. In December 2020, through the Franklin Templeton-Gallup Economics of Recovery Study, we asked 5,000 U.S. adults: "As far as you know, what percentage of people who have been infected by the coronavirus needed to be hospitalized?" Only 18% provided the correct answer, which at that time was between 1% and 5%, and a higher percentage of Republicans (26%) gave the correct response than did Democrats (just 10%). Likewise, experimental research from Gallup and Franklin Templeton found that providing people information about high vaccine efficacy led to greater acceptance of the vaccine."

JPKab 5y ago

> A story from your barber is not only anecdotal, it is quite possibly based on misunderstanding - especially if the barber is inclined to distrust Government. My barber is a young, apolitical Latina. And please explain to me how the family "misunderstood" a death certificate saying she died of COVID, contacted the hospital, the hospital looked into it, and agreed it was an error and fixed it... This is a straightforward chain of events. > To really estimate Covid fatalities it is not enough to count reported Covid deaths, you also need to look at other numbers - specifically "excess mortality": How many people have died in the last 2 years compared to in "normal" years? How do you separate out the vastly increased number of deaths from diseases of despair like addiction? What about people like my mother-in-law, who went into cardiac arrest hours after her second shot due to a rare adverse event? She was in the midst of a fever. (The hospital, understandably overwhelmed by covid cases, inadvertently forgot to report her death to VAERS, despite the team of cardiologists recommending they do so.) Every single hospital in the US has a huge financial incentive to test for covid, which was deliberate to prevent the undercounting you are talking about. It's clear that the incentives are biased towards over counting, with the CDC admitting a few days ago that they are working on getting separate numbers for "hospitalized for covid/hospitalized with covid". > arguing that the "mass media" is deliberately exaggerating the danger is plain disinformation and wishful thinking. Mass media has absolutely obfuscated the stratification of risk by age. This indirectly results in most members of the public dramatically overestimating their personal risk. This is obvious, but also documented quantitatively by Gallup. It's not a small overestimation either, but orders of magnitude. You may be one of these people for all I know. Someone is responsible for the public being grossly misinformed on this topic. I think it's the media combined with CDC, but perhaps you have other ideas. From Gallup: https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimates-covid-hospitalization-risk.aspx https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimat... "Previous Gallup research has found that the American public has a poor understanding of the true risks associated with the COVID-19 pandemic and that misperceptions vary by political party. In December 2020, through the Franklin Templeton-Gallup Economics of Recovery Study, we asked 5,000 U.S. adults: "As far as you know, what percentage of people who have been infected by the coronavirus needed to be hospitalized?" Only 18% provided the correct answer, which at that time was between 1% and 5%, and a higher percentage of Republicans (26%) gave the correct response than did Democrats (just 10%). Likewise, experimental research from Gallup and Franklin Templeton found that providing people information about high vaccine efficacy led to greater acceptance of the vaccine."