This amounts to a baseless conspiracy theory against doctors that accurately understand and record the cause of death. Blunt trauma in a car accident is not being recorded as covid.
""If you were in hospice and had already been given a few weeks to live, and then you also were found to have COVID, that would be counted as a COVID death. It means technically even if you died of a clear alternate cause, but you had COVID at the same time, it's still listed as a COVID death. So, everyone who's listed as a COVID death doesn't mean that that was the cause of the death, but they had COVID at the time of the death." Dr. Ezike outlined." -- Dr. Ngozi Ezike, Director of Illinois Department of Public Health
Poor definitions enable people to present the data differently depending on their biases and agendas. We should want to prevent that not by grounds of "you're crazy," but by making the definitions non-interpretable.
There have been a lot of excess deaths in 2020. It seems reasonable to guess those people died of either COVID-19 or our response to COVID-19 (eg reluctance to seek medical treatment). None of these mortality statistics are perfect, but given the fairly short window of a mild COVID-19 infection, it seems pretty reasonable as a first approximation to assume that if they had it when they died, they died from it. There might be some cases where this is wrong (died of severe trauma during a car wreck in which they were a passenger rather than a driver) or questionable (the hospice case) but how much do those really affect the overall numbers?
[1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/coronavirus/ct-dataviz-corona...
Edit: Maybe hospice is the best translation for särskilt boende.
According to one investigation [1] among people who died outside of hospitals 15% died directly from covid, 70% had other comorbidities, and 15% died from something else while they had covid.
[0] https://gupea.ub.gu.se/bitstream/2077/40037/1/gupea_2077_400...
[1] https://lakartidningen.se/aktuellt/nyheter/2020/08/covid-19-...
It seems reasonable to create a statistical analysis based on years of expected life lost -- but that still doesn't mean people aren't dying from Covid19.
Aside, slightly tangential: Back in Feb/March BMJ had some controversy about UK government hiding excess Winter deaths in flu statistics. The implication being that the gov were taking more deaths over Winter and saying it was flu when in fact the deaths were more related to poverty (no heating, little food). Next thing we know people are saying Covid19 want a problem because it wasn't even as bad as flu (though at the time is was killing far more people as a proportion of those infected). Lies and statistics, and all that.
I don't think this is what they're saying. I think the point is that those people's actual times of death weren't far enough from their expected times of death given their preexisting conditions to be able to confidently say that they died of Covid, rather than just having died with it. In other words, that there's a good chance they would have died at the exact same time even without Covid.
Presumably you think doctors have always been lying about cause of death? What do you think their motivation for that is?
They still died of CoVID-19. A lot of people have heart disease, or diabetes, or are overweight, or have any number of other conditions. If they get CoVID-19 and die, you can't just write that off because they were overweight.
If you look at the official statistics for the whole country right now, 26% of all dead where 90 years or older, and 41% 80-89 years old. Most of them weren't just a bit out of shape, they were already sick.
If I were a betting man, based on these numbers, I'd put my money on excess mortality once everything's been tallied, at least in that county.
[1] https://www.scb.se/en/About-us/news-and-press-releases/exces...
Also, I doubt the amount of people suffering from broken legs are really skewing those Covid numbers. Most people sick enough to require hospitalization while also infected with Covid will have much higher risks of Covid-related symptoms as well.
You'd be surprised. Around 1/7th of the covid hospitalizations in Denmark[0] are hospitalized for "other reasons" - where covid is not the primary factor - I'd say that is significant.
[0] - https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/indland/braekket-ben-fylder-i-cent... (link only in danish, sorry)
We have multiple standards for each country (if not smaller governmental units) and the standards have changed, the testing has changed, etc. Statisticians will be decades puzzling it all out.
It's really only excess mortality we can count on right now.
> It does appear to the case, however, that a motorcyclist who was killed in a traffic accident also tested positive for COVID-19, and was initially listed among Florida’s COVID-19-related deaths. But officials from the Florida Department of Health said that person has since been removed from the count.
I can't read the paywall'd Telegraph article but I think this [2] is the same:
> The ONS looked at nearly 4,000 deaths during March in England and Wales where coronavirus was mentioned on the death certificate. In 91% of cases the individuals had other health problems. The most common was heart disease, followed by dementia and respiratory illness. On average, people dying also had roughly three other health conditions.
So basically -- people's other health problems cause them to be more severely affected by a respiratory disease that has also been shown to affect the heart and brain [3]. That seems like an intuitive result, and the study backs it up.
> It's really only excess mortality we can count on right now.
The excess mortality will certainly show the bigger impact in the long term, but to imply COVID-19 death numbers are being artificially inflated or so grossly inaccurate that they're useless is irrational.
[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/florida-motorcyclist-covid...
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/health-52308783
[3] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/i...
Someone stated that vehicular accidents are not being reported as COVID-19; I found a counterpoint. And I do not doubt that it is one of many. That is all.
It's science. Questioning the easy numbers is what you're supposed to do. You tear and kick at something that is "known" until you get sick of it and move on to something else. Similarly, we have just oodles of confounding factors for our statistics here and we should be acutely aware of it at every step. This is not a thing that rests.
Are you sure car accidents are not recorded as Covid, because I've read claims to the otherwise several times. It may not matter what the doctors think, if there are policies in place, or financial incentives (extra money for treatment of Covid patients).