@ABSORBER posted:Of course you realize that "COVID-19 Deaths" includes anyone who died AND tested positive or was untested and presumed to be positive, correct?
Just like the guy killed in a motorcycle accident someone mentioned earlier today.
So of course when you look at the sheer number who test positive (as the press likes to point out) don't you think quite a few people who died may also have had the virus in their system?
Does that mean they died because of COVID-19 or COVID-19 complications?
Of course not.
Anecdote is not the singular of data. I'd need a lot more evidence that people are being counted as Covid deaths despite obvious other causes that one story posted on a baseball website. Likewise, there's been a lot of data popping up online about excess deaths in this period relative to prior years that suggest that the number of Covid deaths is under-counted generally. That data also needs to be analyzed more carefully than I have seen to account for potential factors like decreases in auto accident deaths due to lockdowns/uneployment and increases in fatalities for things like stroke and heart attacks that may have been born out of reticence to go to doctors/hospitals in a pandemic.
The idea that the US is broadly over-counting deaths due to Covid is largely unsupported by any evidence I've seen. Past history with similar events suggests that knowing the full impact of the virus on both direct and related mortality will require analysis of vast reams of data after the fact. See, for example, conflicting estimates of the mortality rates of the 1918 pandemic, and the more recent H1N1 pandemic. All we really have to go on in the current time frame are necessarily incomplete numbers from various countries, at least some of which are of questionable veracity. I'm no expert in foreign healthcare systems/reporting, but there are obvious reasons to doubt numbers from China, and the mortality rates in different parts of Europe compared to the US, Asia and South/Central America suggest some unknown factors at work or differences in reporting standards.