Scare stories aplenty say coronavirus deaths are under-counted. Evidence and common sense point the other way. One example: The San Diego County Supervisor says they only had "
six pure, solely coronavirus deaths" out of 190 recorded coronavirus deaths as of May 13.
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1.
If there's chicken in the soup, it's called chicken soup. It's called chicken soup even if there are more veggies than chicken and the chicken was just powder in the broth. The same happens with COVID deaths. Doctors will often be right. (It was the chicken in the chicken soup the mother-in-law made). What goes on the death certificate will often be wrong. Any death with the virus detected or antibodies to the virus detected, goes on the books as a COVID death. Yet, as you know, many people have mild infections and the presence of antibodies in the general population runs possibly fifty times higher than the rate of hospitalizations. This is just common sense. Many will die that have the virus incidentally or as one more stress among many.
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2.
It's complicated. A seriously ill person has a lot of systems failing and generating symptoms. A skilled physician can still just be guessing.
3.
A bump in deaths today means a dip later. This is no excuse to belittle current deaths of the elderly. Most deaths are people who were at risk of dying in the very near future. Someone in a hospice with three weeks to live, will be called a COVID death if she tests positive near her death. The deaths have been moved forward weeks or months and the patient was expecting to die soon. This troubles me less than deaths of people who'd normally live another ten years.
4.
Hospitals have a financial incentive to over count. The CARES act gives a 20% funding bonus for COVID related treatment, at a time when hospitals are in financial crisis because other services have been cut back or suspended.
5.
Some see the pandemic as an opportunity to gain power for socialist agendas and find it helpful, not that people died but that the stats say a lot of people died. Fearful voters allow their freedom to be replaced by benevolent paternalism. I am sure this influences the reporting but not the treatment. "To make things look a little bit worse".
6.
Birx of the CDC says she thinks about 25% of the deaths are over counts that mix case counts with death counts, a result of CDC's antiquated accounting system.
7.
New York City is the death epicentre. NYC policies and their infectious subway have an outsize effect on US statistics.
This post
builds on a good article by John Lott at Townhall.com which has supporting links to CARES, Dr. Birx and more.
