HuskerBoard

You cant guess when someone may or may not die from a comorbidity. Just b/c they die and are positive for Covid doesnt prove Covid was actual cause. That person could have died from cancer, copd, etc in hours or months. Just b/c they were Covid positive doesnt mean it caused the death. Are some of them due to Covid? Sure. Were they all due to Covid? No way. There needs to be proof. Just b/c they had Covid isnt proof they died from it. Of 10 people in a long term care center that died, i would say there is a 0.00001% chance they all truly died from covid. Putting it on the report doesnt make it true. They arent doing autopsies on long term care patients to determine actual cause of death. They are just saying, Well they were Covid positive so i guess thats what we will mark it as. I dont see it as something that can be argued that most likely the covid death numbers are higher than actual, the total positives are lower than actual, therefore the death rate ends up being higher than actual. Thats all im really saying. Even if you want to argue that the covid death numbers are low, the actual positives are definitely low given ~80% are asymptomatic and many, many of those are not getting tested.

If you look at the actual data, it suggests that we are undercounting COVID deaths.

The CDC just released this last night..  From Mar 11-May 2, NYC experienced 24k excess deaths over normal for that time period.  14k were classified as COVID positive, 5k were classified as COVID probable.  That leaves 5k undetermined excess deaths.  Common sense would tell you that those 5k undetermined excess deaths are probably related to a global pandemic that is going on.

Also, heart issues are a symptom of COVID.  

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/04/covid-19s-consequences-for-the-heart/

@C N Red when you were alive and functioning normally the week before, test positive for COVID, go on a vent, and are dead the next you most likely died from COVID. Resources do not need to be wasted on testing when we don't have enough for the living.  It's not like it's a mystery why these people died. 

This is how it's been done for all disease. As I've said in P&R my grandfather likely died of West Nile. They never tested him, but he was reported in the news and everything as having died from the disease due to the symptoms.

We likely won't know the number of Covid-19 deaths until we compare data from years past, like Knap said above.  In the mean time there are probably some instance of under-reporting, and certainly a lot of instance of over-reporting (since we have a gov't incentive to over-report).  Oh well. 

@NUance What do you mean by a "government incentive to over- report"?  Do you not think hospitals should be paid by Medicare for treating Medicare members with COVID?

@Red Five:  Do you think the hospital in my town would have reported the cancer hospice woman as a Covid-19 death if there was no payment?   

This seems to me like the myth that only scientists funded by big oil should be believed on climate change because government funded scientists have an incentive to be alarmist and some sort of bias, when the opposite is true.  Or that vaccines are dangerous and cause autism and the medical professionals have an incentive to push them because they get more money.

We have states that have stopped releasing covid death information and excess deaths that aren't really accounted for from previous averages.  So at best its probably under-reported.  Then someone misinterprets payments to hospitals treating the pandemic and wants to make it look like they are all committing fraud and trying to screw us over.

This American distrust of educated professionals but blindly latching onto some nutcase conspiracy theory is idiotic.  I wish more people that see things like this would stop and think "wait a minute, that doesn't sound believable, and really sounds like it's been framed to anger me." Then seek actual sources (like nuanced is doing in this status update) , instead of just getting outraged and spreading misinformation.  Everything in life is more nuanced than this "everyone has an agenda and is trying to screw me over" worldview that people that blindly buy into stuff like this seem to have.

Here's something to think about though, if every covid death paid hospitals 17k (which it didn't) that's still ~1.4 billion dollars with the current death toll.  The president turned half a trillion dollars in covid funds into his own piggy bank having basically no oversight or visibility into where our tax dollars go there, that's 400x the amount of money we are talking about for ALL covid deaths thus far.  That's where outrage should be directed because we all have a right to see where our taxes go.

Oh, I think there's plenty of targets for outrage to be aimed at.  The whole thing is a clusterfark.  The thing is, it's hard to know what's accurate and what is not.  There is no one source of trusted information to go to.  Every source I can think of either has an ax to grind or some other bias.   

@NUance

 head to the political thread if you want to keep this discussion going.  I am trying to keep politics out of this, but it is difficult

@NUance that's why you look at multiple sources and use critical thinking to decide if that seems plausible or true. The majority of major news outlets have very accurate and good reporting as long as it's not an opinion piece, or is determined to make your mind up for you.

It seems like the major news outlets vary quite a bit in their reporting of Covid-19 facts.  I'm at a loss to point to a major news source that doesn't lean this way or that.  And their stories tend to support their biases.  (With the possible exception of Reuters, which seems mostly unbiased.  I guess.)  

There is not a news source in America that is reporting anything other than the fact that it is being over reported.  You just have to know what you are reading. 

Just because they lean this way or that doesn't mean they aren't credible sources. I've read USA Today articles, NYT, WaPo, CNN, Reuters, AP, NPR, ABC, etc. They all seem to be reporting the same things. I almost never read opinion piece, and on the off chance I do I would never use them as a source of info on their own.

Numbers are jumping around because no place (state/city) reports them the same, and it takes time to compile them or correct errors. Where do you see so much variation?

@ZRod These are the top four results of a google search this morning:  

Google News:  83,082 total Covid deaths in U.S. 

CDC:  51,495 

worldmeters.info: 83,449 

statista.com: 80,820 

Normally, I'd say the CDC is the most credible source of data.  But of the four the CDC is the outlier by a wide margin with the other three in fairly close agreement.  

the CDC has a lag on reporting as they wait for the official death certificates to be filed to count them....not just the hospital reporting the death.  the paperwork is the delay there. 

The lag in reporting makes sense.  But it doesn't address the original inaccuracy I mentioned about the local woman on cancer hospice care who had a heart attack.  Should that have been counted as a Covid-19 death by the hospital?  

I'm looking at the CDC site right now and it's showing 80,820 deaths as of 5/12. Honestly I've been using John Hopkins site all along. They have a great interactive map and the data has followed very closely with what is reported in the news.

i wonder what other pandemic is sweeping the country if we are actually over counting covid deaths as there are thousands more deaths over and above our normal death rate.  why are neither the dems nor republicans even talking about that other mystery pandemic that is apparently sweeping through the country?  this is an outrage that no one is even talking about that pandemic.  we know school shooting deaths and auto accidents are way down......even flu has slowed it's spread with the social distancing.   what is this mystery cause that is spiking us above and beyond the normal death rates?

So ... maybe the cancer hospice heart attack woman died from being exposed to smarmy sarcasm from a message board know-it-all.  Clearly she took the easy way out.