Hacker News Reader

Comment by sfj | Hacker News Reader

> 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.?

View on HN

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.”

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...

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com