Have we discuss the difference between dying with Covid and dying from Covid?
Seeing just how disproportionately high the death toll in the U.S. is compared to the rest of the world has had me thinking what, exactly, counts as a Covid death? (US deaths +470K Vs global total of 2.3Mil deaths)
Someone could die of heart failure who also tested positive for Covid, for which maybe heart failure was accelerated by Covid? Vs those who die exclusively from Covid as tracked by specific methods Covid can kill on its own, such as starving the lungs of oxygen? The latter yielding a lower death toll, of course.
Understandably, with all the chaos Covid has caused throughout the global medical system, they can't be blamed for the differences in how each death is counted one way or another.
We've discussed it at length, albeit that was relatively early in this pandemic.
It seemed like early on, there was a narrative amongst those who were trying to downplay the pandemic that there was a concerted effort to inflate the numbers of COVID deaths by attributing deaths in people who has COVID but clearly died of unrelated causes to COVID.
Despite the number of people pushing that narrative, I don't think it ever really grew legs and walked.
Coroners are smart people.
- If someone comes into the ER bleeding out of the gut from a gunshot wound, and it just so happens that they test him for COVID and he's positive, a coroner WOULD NOT put COVID as contributory to the cause of death.
- If someone comes into the hospital suffering from cough, fever, fatigue, and ALSO has hypertension and congestive heart failure, and tests positive for COVID, and dies of cardiac arrest in the hospital, a coroner WOULD put COVID as contributory factor the cause of death, and it would be counted as a COVID death. Yes, that patient had other problems, but absent a symptomatic COVID infection, there is no reason to believe their death would have been imminent.
The other reason that the narrative was busted is the excess deaths. Just look at the chart halfway down this page...
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htmThe CDC tracks deaths. It's seasonal by nature and goes a little higher during the winter months. But they have trend lines and know roughly, in a large country of 330M people, how many people are expected to die each year/week/month.
You can, in fact, see a blip of excess deaths in the winter of 2017-18, which corresponds with the worst flu season in the last decade. And then you see, starting in Mar 2020, a consistent trend WELL above the line that persists today. If you look at the shape of the graph, that shows an Apr/May peak, a summer mini-peak, and then another major peak around the holidays--exactly what COVID graphs look like.
So the fact of the matter is that a LOT more people died in 2020 than past years. The final numbers aren't available yet, but it's in the same ballpark as the number of people whose deaths are attributed to COVID.
So whether you try to call it dying
from COVID or dying
with COVID, the number of deaths is MUCH higher this year in the middle of a pandemic than previous years.