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Comment by notafraudster | Hacker News Reader

Based on present death rates, COVID will be number three for all cause mortality in the United States this year after all combined cancers and all combined heart disease -- possibly number two!; above all other infectious disease by an order of magnitude; above diabetes, COPD, organ damage, etc. This is despite a low overall mortality rate from COVID per infection.

It is possible that as it continues to be endemic the rates will tick down and so this will not necessarily be true in 2023, 2024, 2025, etc. I am not proposing any policy change or any lockout or anything. but your position is a little bit like saying "a rocket launcher is a weapon, just like a bread knife".

Put another way: a 9/11 every week, still. It would at least behoove us to be sombre about the bloodbath around us.

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Five years ago if you were in a nursing home, got a cold (i.e. a coronavirus) and died, no one would have tested you or made you a statistic to go into the top ten causes of death. Things like that pushing the nearest to end of life are common and not a disaster.

2/3 of the deaths are people over 85 now. If a cancer patient gets covid and dies did the cancer or the Covid do it?

Everybody is going to die, i don’t feel too sad about it. It is very slightly more dangerous to be human now that covid is around and sure that sucks but meh, there are better things to give your attention to.

Spoken like someone not in their 80s, as my parents are.

> Five years ago if you were in a nursing home, got a cold (i.e. a coronavirus) and died, no one would have tested you or made you a statistic to go into the top ten causes of death

There might not have been a test but it's not like cold & flu deaths weren't being recorded, or that we didn't bother to record the cause of death for old people. If you got a cold or flu and died it'd be recorded as such.

You have given more of your attention to letting everyone know you don't care about dead people because that's life than I have to worrying about COVID, with the added bonus that your position comes off as sociopathic and mine doesn't.

Just to give my personal exposure here, my wife had a stroke during the omicron surge and when the hospital wheeled her away on a gurney to get an emergency thrombectomy, making it clear she had a decent chance of just dying on the table, I could not be with her because the COVID burden in the hospital was too high. After she survived the operation she was admitted to a ward full of 80 year olds. Later that night she had a stroke recurrence and the way I found out is that she didn't reply to my text messages for half an hour. My wife is 35, healthy, yoga, biking, hiking, and she had a stroke on our anniversary. We're in the middle of trying for kids. She lived, but it could easily have been the other way.

One response to this is "the problem here is the COVID restrictions, the hospital should have just let infection disease spread, hospitals have never tried to stop infectious disease before, stop treating COVID as anything special" but another response to this is that the medical system has been more or less in perpetual crisis mode this entire time because of the underlying infectious disease burden that you described as "just another of many diseases". And I believe that the infectious disease specialists are better able to gauge the actual risk to their patients than a SV devops guru.

When we got COVID it was two days of fever and a week of fatigue, worse than a cold, better than influenza. Do you understand how it's possible to be impacted by COVID even if like us, you are at little risk from COVID?

Again, I am not calling for any restrictions, any lockdowns, any infringements on your freedom, or any reaction beyond simply a sombre acknowledgement that a lot of people have died, there's a lot of pain, the deaths continue, there remains a huge burden on our society because of the effects of this disease, and we gain nothing from being glib or pretending the people who died don't matter. You have the capacity for empathy, but you need to use it.

As far as I know the data currently includes also people who died with COVID (not because of COVID).

We will need to wait a few years to parse all this data and get the actual number.

No, that's not true.

It may be true if you consider hospitalizations: sometimes people with mild or no COVID symptoms count as COVID hospitalizations because 1) they do need to be in the hospital for something unrelated but 2) they must be kept in a COVID ward until they're not infectious anymore.

However, death cause is not COVID if the hospital finds that you are positive after a car accident and you die of the injuries the day after.

And if you were already say very very old or with comorbidities, and you die of pneumonia with a positive COVID test, then maybe you would have died anyway in a couple months, but still the immediate cause of death is COVID and nothing else makes sense.

The reclassification of any deaths that could be attributed to covid was happening in the spring and before.

Do you have a source for that?

All I'm seeing is under reporting of covid deaths: Brazil: https://journals.plos.org/globalpublichealth/article?id=10.1... USA: https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/nation/2021/12/22/cov...

> And if you were already say very very old or with comorbidities,

> and you die of pneumonia with a positive COVID test, then maybe you

> would have died anyway in a couple months, but still the immediate cause of

> death is COVID and nothing else makes sense.

I 100% agree if we go by what is written on their death certificate.

But...

For example in state of Massachusetts the COVID death definition includes anyone who has COVID listed as a cause of death on their death certificate, and any individual who has had a COVID-19 diagnosis within 60 days but does not have COVID listed as a cause of death on their death certificate [1].

CDC guidelines [2] are 100% clear but the problem is that we started counting also people which do not have COVID listed in certificate signed by doctor. I do not know - kinda crap.

The California rules are kinda interesting also [3]:

• The decedent had confirmatory laboratory evidence for SARS-CoV-2 (i.e. detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in a clinical or autopsy specimen using a molecular amplification test) AND at least ONE of the following criteria is met:

- A case investigation determined that COVID-19 was the cause of death or contributed to the death.

- The death certificate indicates COVID-19 or an equivalent term as one of the causes of death, regardless of the time elapsed since specimen collection of the confirmatory laboratory test used to define the case.

- The death occurred within 30 days of specimen collection for the confirmatory laboratory test used to define the case and was due to natural causes

In other words, if somebody dies within 30 days of being tested for COVID and death was due to natural causes then the death is counted as COVID death. Even if it is not on the death certificate.

[1] https://www.mass.gov/news/department-of-public-health-update...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvss/vsrg/vsrg03-508.pdf

[3] https://www.co.shasta.ca.us/docs/libraries/shasta-ready-docs...

Which country are you referring to? Last I checked (few months ago) the CDC in the US was still counting COVID deaths as any deceased with active COVID infection. They are collecting minor comorbidity data, at least that is what they made public in their dataset.

I realize this site has global users but the parent comment was correct. Not sure why he's being downvoted.

> Last I checked (few months ago) the CDC in the US was still counting COVID deaths as any deceased with active COVID infection.

This is not at all an accurate summary of the CDC’s Cause of Death reporting guidelines for Covid-19: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvss/vsrg/vsrg03-508.pdf

If you die in a car accident with Covid-19 in your system, the UCOD is massive trauma from car accident, not “Covid-19”. The CDC reporting guidelines make it clear that Covid only rises to the level of UCOD if it meets the criteria of “ (a) the disease or injury which initiated the train of morbid events leading directly to death”

That is only regarding death certificates. Some states have rule to report COVID death like this: COVID death certificate plus if tested positive in last 60 days (California just changed to 30 after backclash). And California has only have natural death requirement listed for younger that 18. It is interesting these rules are only in dem states.

So I bet that California has overreported number of deaths while Florida has underreported.

I also did not believe this.

> Some states have rule to report COVID death like this

The claim was specifically about CDC reporting rules, not the rules of how individual states report statistics themselves (which the CDC has no control over).

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