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Comment by jeremyjh | Hacker News Reader

This is so tiresome. Someone has cancer for six months, gets COVID and dies 17 days later and now Tucker Carlson is here telling me not to count that death. How often do you really think it happens that someone is hospitalized with COVID (otherwise, they'd not even be getting tested most places in the world) and dies of something else a week later? I'm sure it has happened a few times, but what has also been happening hundreds of times every day is people die untested and are not included in the official numbers. Its ridiculous to even have this discussion, and the motivations for it are absolutely disgusting.

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Especially because the same people always compare the numbers with influenza, which are almost entirely based on statistics and comparison to previous years. For example in Germany in 2017 25000 people died of influenza (the bad flu year), but people which had a confirmed death due to influenza (i.e. Being tested positive and died of it) were something like 300 IIRC.

Don't get me wrong I think it's perfectly valid to use statistics for estimating the impact/IFR but you can't like many people with an agenda pick and choose your counting methods.

It could be an information problem. Is the medical system even allow 2 causes of death. Underlying condition and ...

Most death report forms have fields for a primary cause and contributing causes.

For influenza, the CDC includes deaths by pneumonia during flu season as part of the official death count because the certificates don't reliably list the true cause of death.

We see this happening now in the US with unofficial deaths getting lumped into the C19 deaths, some of which may very well have been flu.

Actually at least in Germany the numbers for influenza are entirely based on statistics. In particular the 25000 people died of influenza in 2017 number that is thrown around is based on looking at the usual statistics over the same period and everything above that is attributed to influenza. I think we will only have only have accurate statistics about the death rates etc in maybe a year

> Someone has cancer for six months, gets COVID and dies 17 days later and now Tucker Carlson is here telling me not to count that death.

If someone has cancer and then gets a bad cold and dies, what should the cause of death be? Or what if they fell, etc.?

The OECD definition for a cause of death is the “disease or injury that initiated the train of morbid events leading directly to death...”

They also recognize a a contributory cause of death, defined as “a significant condition that unfavourably influences the course of the morbid process and thus contributes to the fatal outcome, but which is not related to the disease or condition directly causing death.”

If someone had AIDS and died of pneumocystis pneumonia, the latter is the cause of death, and the former is the cause of the latter.

So, if there was an epidemic of pneumonia going around, would you count that as a death due to pneumonia, and then use that statistic to help justify lock downs and enforced social distancing?

Because that is what is happening when you take an extremely sick person who finally died and slap a "death by covid-19" label on them.

There wouldn’t be an epidemic of pneumocystis pneumonia without an epidemic of immunodeficiency so I’m not sure that applies. But I see what you’re getting at. And, yes, e.g. if a COPD sufferer died of pneumonia of the pandemic strain I would call that a death attributable to the pandemic, noting that the COPD probably made them more susceptible.

When influenza deaths are estimated each year, the models assume that a lot of people will die due to the virus but the cause will be recorded as heart failure or pneumonia without etiology. From the perspective of the epidemiologist, they are influenza deaths, even if they were old and frail with bad hearts.

Yes, just like when someone suffers life-long health complications because of pneumonia, and then dies of something which otherwise may not have killed them, the cause of death is counted as the most recent event, not pneumonia. I think it suffices to say it goes both ways.

The cause of death would be the cold, yes. That's how tallying these statistics work and yes, people can die from the cold.

If someone ends up catching pneumonia because their immune system was compromised as a result of immunotherapy, pneumonia was the direct cause of death and the cancer lead up to pneumonia.

The fact that we have to have this argument about basic death statistics is depressing. If you really wanted to play around with the numbers like what you're suggesting, you could easily make it so covid-19 causes zero deaths just by looking far back enough to find a contributing factor. Like age, immune system issues, other injuries, obesity etc.

> If you really wanted to play around with the numbers like what you're suggesting, you could easily make it so covid-19 causes zero deaths just by looking far back enough to find a contributing factor. Like age, immune system issues, other injuries, obesity etc.

Or that cancer causes zero deaths...

> and the motivations for it are absolutely disgusting.

What are those?

Desperation to reopen and juice corporate profits/wall street

Not a desire for a better understanding of the issues?

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