Jet Black said:
My guess is there are multiple opinion posts on this thread, so why don't you relax.
The government is classifying the deaths of patients infected with the virus as COVID-19 deaths, regardless of any underlying health issues that may have contributed to the loss of someone's life.
This is correct, people confirmed as having the Covid 19 virus and who have died are probably getting grouped into Covid 19 deaths. If they are being perfectly coded and recorded, I doubt it - it's always an issue (and I don't think just the government classified this). Look at the leading causes of death in America, like cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, influenza/pneumonia. It is not accurate to say that none of those million deaths only had one condition, the condition their death was linked to - many, if not most, have multiple conditions. Someone determines the main contributor regardless of other conditions, and into that bucket their death goes. Your comment is they are listed as Covid deaths regardless of other underlying issues - how would you recommend that be recorded? A Covid illness may last a month, are you suggesting those other conditions would have killed the person within that same month long time frame? A week later? A year later? Does that impact how it is coded?
I love accurate data and feel a huge bulk of our resources should be put into testing for active virus and antibodies, if the tests are accurate, so we can paint a better picture of what this disease is, it's history, if the world (not just US) has responded correctly, and what the best path forward is. BUt I don't think the challenges with coding the deaths are done intentionally to inflate things, or paint an incorrect picture, but it's just a challenge when coding a death for someone with a number of conditions. I do like seeing good data on the deaths - by age, what other contributors existed, etc - but I feel nearly everyone would have had a longer life without Covid 19. And I feel another huge statistic, which drove many of the worldwide actions, was the hospitalization rate for all ages, all conditions, without a death and how that would overwhelm resources. I want to keep seeing good data on that.
A snippet from a study, not specific to Covid:
Inaccuracies of Death Certificate Diagnoses
In reality, death certificate diagnoses are often inaccurate as a result of either erroneous clinical diagnoses or incorrect or inadequate coding of the diagnosis.5 This has been a longstanding problem. In 1955, James et al6 found that in a comparison of 1889 death certificates with corresponding autopsy reports, only 52% of cases had full agreement between 3-digit ICD codes. A 1980 series of 257 autopsied cases found that 42% of cases had improper recording of the underlying cause of death.7 Malignant neoplasms were underreporled by 10%, and vascular diseases were overreported by 10%.More recently, Roulson et al8 performed a meta-analysis of articles published between 1980 and 2004 that studied discrepancies between clinical and postmortem diagnoses. The authors found that the rate of misdiagnosis has not significantly improved since the 1960s: At least one third of death certificates are likely to be incorrect, and 50% of autopsies produce findings unsuspected before death, underlining the importance of autopsy. These studies show that the inconsistencies and inaccuracies of cause-of-death reporting have been an issue over the past several decades and continue to present a major problem.It can be argued that autopsy discrepancy studies such as those outlined above are biased because the autopsied cases may have been those in which the cause of death was particularly obscure clinically. However, in a 1980 study by Cameron et al,9 an autopsy rate of 65% was reached for 6 months to try to diminish the effect of selection bias. They found that in 38% of cases the cause of death was still discrepant between the autopsy findings and the death certificate, even when clinicians were "certain" or "fairly certain" about their diagnoses. Interestingly, in cases in which clinicians indicated that they would not normally have requested an autopsy, the discrepancy rate was similar to those cases in which they would have. This finding indicates that it is difficult for a clinician to predict which cases will have discrepant diagnoses.Furthermore, a 1992 study in East Germany by Modelmog et al10 autopsied 96.5% of deaths in a 1-year time period in the city of Goerlitz and compared these results with the death certificates. The authors found that 47% of diagnoses on the death certificate differed from that on autopsy and that, in 30% of all subjects, these differences crossed a major disease category. Interestingly, this study confirmed that diseases of the circulatory system were likely to be overdiagnosed. These results are similar to those of autopsy studies, which do not randomly sample patients or include all subjects, indicating that selection bias alone is unlikely to account for their results.