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> “Underlying cause” can literally be anything though. People with mild asthma that absolutely wouldn’t have died from a cold may have caught COVID and died. A
by tablespoon 5y ago
> “Underlying cause” can literally be anything though. People with mild asthma that absolutely wouldn’t have died from a cold may have caught COVID and died.
Also it's relatively uncommon to be able to attribute a bad result unambiguously to a single thing. For instance most human-error disasters are the result of a cascade of mistakes, and the omission of any one could have prevented the disaster.
- josephcsible 5y agoThis is true. The problem is that if COVID is anywhere in the cascade, the death gets recorded as being entirely because of COVID.
- tablespoon 5y ago> This is true. The problem is that if COVID is anywhere in the cascade, the death gets recorded as being entirely because of COVID. That's not a problem if your goal is to determine the effects of the COVID variable (or the effects on interventions on it), which is what most people are trying to do with these statistics. Trying to discount deaths other than those entirely attributable to COVID in public discourse is really just a propaganda tactic to downplay COVID. It's not something you'd do if your goal was anything else.
- josephcsible 5y agoBut we don't do the same for any other cause of death. For example, we don't track "obesity deaths". Are we downplaying literally every other cause of death in the world?
- tablespoon 5y ago> But we don't do the same for any other cause of death. For example, we don't track "obesity deaths". Are we downplaying literally every other cause of death in the world? So? Maybe a deadly pandemic disease is different than obesity and shouldn't be treated exactly the same.
- josephcsible 5y agoIt seems like circular logic to use the fact that a disease is called "deadly" to justify more lax standards for counting deaths caused by it.