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Comment by steveeq1 | Hacker News Reader

There are considerable financial incentives to "fudge the numbers" regarding corona. It's to the point where if someone has a stroke, and he has corona, it will be counted as a "corona death".

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I've heard that repeatedly, and then even Musk parroted that, and it's time to kill that muddying of the waters because it confuses people. Here's the thing - you can't hide dead bodies, and at some point, somewhere, a death is counted. And if someone has a stroke and it's falsely a coronadeath, as you put it, there's a stat called Excess Deaths that's available for that reason.[1] If there's a sudden spike in overall deaths, then it's harder to fudge the numbers, as you say. Unless suddenly there are more strokes or other dangerous things going on such that more people die in ways unrelated to corona. The closest argument would be the economic situation is killing people, but that's a huge stretch (people don't just drop dead because they're out of work).

1 - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

That may be true, but the evidence mostly is pointing in the direction of undercounting COVID deaths. In northern Italy the official death count was less than half of "excess deaths", with the worst-hit areas having the most excess deaths. Certainly some of the excess deaths are due to people avoiding hospitals, or higher stress levels, but a lot are due to COVID deaths at home, or undiagnosed COVID deaths. Also, we still don't really understand this disease enough to know what effects it has on the body. There have been reports of people with COVID having strokes at much higher rates than would be expected for the same age demographic. It will be hard to tell which complications were coincidence and which were caused by COVID until later on when we have more data.

> Also, we still don't really understand this disease enough to know what effects it has on the body.

This is especially worrying, now that the US military is barring previously hospitalized COVID survivors from enlisting and not allowing waivers.

> This is especially worrying, now that the US military is barring previously hospitalized COVID survivors from enlisting and not allowing waivers.

That's almost certainly a temporary policy because of the lack of information enacted with the expectation that it will be evolved based on future information, not something that should make the lack of information more worrying.

Let's hope so

Given the effects of Covid on the age range of people wanting to join the military this policy seems rather pointless. Very few people will be affected.

For sure in that regard. I'm more curious about why though? Is it because of the unknowns? Or is there a known that's being held back to avoid panic?

Regardless, who knows? I'm just curious to know

There’s a big global uptick in mortality even in countries where a national healthcare system lacks that financial incentive. Unless you have hard proof that there’s widespread misreporting it’s actively harmful to spread conspiracy theories during a pandemic.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav...

For all ages with non-negligible COVID-19 mortality rates (i.e., everyone over ~60), the baseline total mortality rate over the course of a few weeks is orders of magnitude lower than the mortality rate for COVID-19 over that same time period. The amount by which attributing all deaths in COVID-19 patients to COVID-19 could overstate the true case fatality rate is negligible.

This is the theory that has been peddled quite a bit. But doesn’t really add up, since you can easily do a year over year comparison of death numbers. Unless, you suddenly think a significant portion of people are dying of heart attack this year

It is highly likely that if someone with corona has a stroke it is caused by the corona. Coronavirus causes clotting.

What kind of incentives are we talking here? Honest question; I don't have insight into the medical care sector.

I might have the numbers off a bit, but it's something like...

If you have a patient at your hospital and you are able to give them a covid diagnosis, you get $8k from the federal government. If you can put them on a ventilator for a few minutes, you get $35k from the federal government. This is intended to help offset the costs of care for covid patients to healthcare providers. You can get a covid diagnosis by having some of the sympoms... like coughing, weakness, shortness of breath, etc. I imagine it's difficult to die from anything without some weakness or shortness of breath. So it is very easy to say the patient had "covid-like" symptoms, and put covid as the cause of death.

Now, keep in mind that at the same time, healthcare providers are furloughing and laying off workers. Since "non-essential" care is on hold, there's not enough work for people to do in most places in the country. This places healthcare providers in a difficult moral position where they can inflate a number and keep their employees on payroll, or strictly follow it and lay everyone off.

One easy way to help with this data issue is to simply differentiate the deaths where a person had covid-like symptoms vs a death where a person actually tested positive for covid.

Blood clots are a symptom of coronavirus. I'm not sure what else we should expect here.

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