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Comment by VBprogrammer | Hacker News Reader

I suspect you are being downvoted because of your question about what it means to have died from COVID.

I agree this is a trope which is trotted out by vaccine deniers and even those who said that COVID itself was a hoax before that.

However, 1500 people in the UK die on an average day. Remember back in the days we were able to point to the number of excess deaths in the UK? 14 people dead in 2 weeks is very near the noise floor. Unfortunately what we would like to know is how much longer these people would have lived without COVID. I suspect this is not knowable.

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He merely asked for the number of deaths directly caused by Covid. Where do you get the idea that anyone is questioning what it means to die from Covid?

Directly caused is a very tricky question to answer on both the positive and negative sides. For example is someone who has terminal cancer who dies of COVID counted? Even though they are on a cocktail of drugs to treat the cancer they may well have lived for months or years later.

Similarly, someone with well managed diabetes, do we write them off as having a comortality even though they may have lived for decades longer by all available indications.

> I agree this is a trope which is trotted out by vaccine deniers and even those who said that COVID itself was a hoax before that.

As you can see from this[1] Freedom of Information (FOI) request, the ONS makes a distinction between "Involving COVID-19" and "Due to COVID-19".

> Unfortunately what we would like to know is how much longer these people would have lived without COVID. I suspect this is not knowable.

It's also interesting to see in that FOI answer the average age of death is higher than the average life expectancy in the UK. It might give an indication of whether people are being taken to meet their maker early.

[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/fre...

Anti-vaxxers exploit methodological deficiencies to push their agenda. People that should be improving their methodology exploit anti-vaxxers absurdity to maintain status quo.

People on the “anti side” of the debate have been asking this for 2 years. It was a valid question then and a more important one now.

It is likely that a significant percentage of people are dying with incidental Covid infections. Depending on how significant, that completely changes the dynamics.

Well, you can estimate the probability of someone randomly selected in the population testing positive for covid at a certain point in time. The probability of "dying with Covid" should be similar unless there is evidence of a bias.

Sloppy formulation of mine, its an upper limit i think.

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