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Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

People are dying in their homes both from not going to the hospital and from suicide. This isn't just about whether people are killed by one particular virus.

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Depending on which country you're talking about, maybe it's also about having a humane and compassionate healthcare system.

This isn't restricted to one country. The UK is one of the few countries with universal tax-funded healthcare that's free at the point of use, and we're still having problems with people dying in their homes rather than going to the hospital due to fear of the coronavirus.

Those numbers are tiny compared to the virus deaths, and even more tiny compared to the death rate if the virus was simply allowed to cull as many people as possible.

CDC is estimating that a little less than 40% of the excess deaths in the past few weeks were not caused by COVID-19: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

That is not what I get from this page.

> These deaths could represent misclassified COVID-19 deaths, or potentially could be indirectly related to COVID-19 (e.g., deaths from other causes occurring in the context of health care shortages or overburdened health care systems).

That is not saying "those deaths were not caused by COVID-19". They explicitly mention that these could be misclassified.

Nice catch, thanks. Most of them are not, you'll find out:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/patients-with-heart-at...

https://boston.cbslocal.com/2020/05/04/coronavirus-covid-19-...

https://www.nydailynews.com/coronavirus/ny-coronavirus-queen...

I don't think I've even seen anyone figure out what that number is. On HN there have recently been articles posted that suggest that nobody actually knows how many people are dying. How did you conclude that non-virus lockdown deaths are "tiny"?

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