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But that's not helpful for driving any kind of informed opinion or public health policy. It'd be like classifying nearly all deaths as caused by "cardiac arres
by lukev 3y ago
But that's not helpful for driving any kind of informed opinion or public health policy.
It'd be like classifying nearly all deaths as caused by "cardiac arrest" even though that's the natural end state of most other causes of death.
I might accept your argument in the small fraction of cases where natural death is not "reasonably foreseeable" (since that requirement was dropped in 2019).
- junofan 3y agoThe medical certificate usually has an immediate cause and a spot to write underlying causes. It goes to the local government and is used for things like life insurance, lawsuits, etc. If there’s a concern at the policy level, usually you’d have a separate monitoring system. Driving policy with population stats is not really the gold standard, in spite of what was communicated to the public during the pandemic. Usually you’d want to run some kind of controlled experiment or very rigorous observational study. That’s where the bulk of the success stories in medicine have come from historically.