Comment by just-juan-post | Hacker News Reader

Comment by just-juan-post | Hacker News Reader

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Hospitals are paid extra if the primary cause of death is listed as Covid. I have seen a handful of posts on Reddit from hospital employees who have been told to put Covid as the cause of death if the person tests positive but I won't link them here as they are not as verifiable.

From FactCheck.org's article: [1]

> “If we think it’s presumptive … we can go ahead and put down COVID-19,” Jensen said, “or even in some situations, even if it’s negative.” He pointed to the example of a 38-year-old man in Minnesota whose death was attributed to the coronavirus even though he tested negative.

There are direct financial incentives to list a person who has Covid as deceased by Covid.

[1] - https://www.factcheck.org/2020/04/hospital-payments-and-the-...

From the very same article you posted

> "As for the accuracy of the death toll, other experts have previously told us that while it’s true that some deaths attributed to COVID-19 likely would have occurred regardless of the disease, other factors — like the deaths of undiagnosed COVID-19 victims, including those that occur at home — contribute to a more significant problem of under-counting the deaths."

Funny I have friends "on both sides of this issue" so I went out and did the common sense thing of adding up the CDC deaths, subtracting the baseline average deaths and noticing that the difference between 2020 and previous years is pretty much exactly the number of deaths the CDC attributes to Covid. You don't need to be an expert to do that.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/#S2

That doesn't explain why more people in general are dying.

Like, if you look at the number of people who died in the past week in the USA, and compare to the number who died during the same period last year, the first number is much more bigger than the second one.

Financial incentives might skew the numbers, but that's why statisticians look at multiple sources of data.

>Hospitals are paid extra if the primary cause of death is listed as Covid.

such nonsense

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