>Italy, where 12,428 people have now died from COVID-19
with, not from
edit: First downvote after less than 10 seconds, and now [flagged] and will get -4'd. Be proud.
with, not from
edit: First downvote after less than 10 seconds, and now [flagged] and will get -4'd. Be proud.
In any case I am convinced that the number of victims is probably much higher.
There was an article where number of deaths was compared with previous years in towns around Bergamo. I cannot find the link now, so the numbers my be a bit wrong, but for example I remember that in a town of ~11k inhabitants, they had 150 deaths this March compared to the usual 20-30 of the previous years. This means that COVID-19 could have caused about 100 deaths while the official numbers say little more than 20.
EDIT: Found the article [1]:
"We checked the average of the previous years, in the January-March timeframe. In Nembro it should have been - in normal conditions - about 35 deaths. This years the municipality registered 158 deaths. 123 more than the average. Not 31 more, as it should have been according to the official numbers."
[1] https://www.tpi.it/cronaca/studio-nembro-numero-morti-superi...
Yes, it matters. No stat records whether they would or wouldn't have survived without COVID-19. That's the problem with them: they just record the presence of the virus, not whether it caused death (which is at any rate a rather nuanced judgement, presumably).
The idea this virus is hyper-dangerous is coming from comparisons between these figures and other viruses which aren't recorded in the same way. Incomparable statistics being compared can lead to completely false conclusions.
they had 150 deaths this March compared to the usual 20-30 of the previous years
But they had far fewer deaths in December compared to the December of previous years:
http://www.salute.gov.it/portale/caldo/SISMG_sintesi_ULTIMO....
You would expect deaths to be higher in March than in prior years even if the virus was exactly as dangerous as flu, but pushed forwards by some months, because lots of people survived the winter who in prior years would not have done. So excess deaths will appear higher for now, but if you look at the areas under the graph, it looks a bit like it's just the normal winter surge delayed (so far ... it'll probably end up a fair bit higher, but we don't know that).
It seems to me that literally every number being used to support the notion that this is a very dangerous disease is statistically invalid in some way.
I've told this story before - my dad has fought cancer for 8 years before he died, he was in paliatative care and one night his heart just couldn't go any longer and he passed away.
What do you think he has officially died "from"? Any sensible person would list his specific cancer as the cause of death, right? Nope, all the hospital wrote in his report was "died of cardiac arrest". So he exists in a statistical report somewhere as a 50 year old who died of...heart problems. That probably leads to some other people somewhere else going "hmmmmm, we have a weirdly large number of people dying from heart problems lately - better increase the cardiology budget!".
Do you see what I'm going at? Even if someone already had ongoing problems when they got covid19, both should be listed as the cause of death.
Now with many sars-cov-2 stories when you dig into individual cases you often find things like in the article: Two people died from a fall. They also had a positive test but I would argue the fall was definitely the major cause of death. They still are in the "died from" number almost all news outlets spew out right now.
This is litterally the evidence we're using the justify the lockdowns. Initially I thought it was some grammatical thing you were getting at e.g. a building is evacuated not a person.
https://twitter.com/leorahorwitzmd/status/124479555159561421...
The death counts record the number of people who died after testing positive for this coronavirus. This isn't how deaths related to any other respiratory infection are recorded. There is upward pressure on the number from people with comorbidity for whom Covid-19 wasn't the primary cause of death, and there is also downward pressure on the number from people who died due to Covid-19's effects but were never tested. The relative magnitude of those different pressures is not known at this point.
Probably important to point out the large regional variation.
In the UK the doctor has to be able to say to the best of their knowledge and belief that covid-19 was the cause of death before putting it on the death certificate.
We're not testing everyone, not even the ones in hospital for severe respiratory illness. We don't test dead people. So this feels like it's going to under-count, not over-count the deaths.
If this was just people who were going to die anyway we wouldn't have the huge rates of excess mortality. We know we have excess mortality because (again in the UK) we're having to build temporary morgues to hold all the dead bodies, and we're having to change the process to register deaths.
Is "covid-19 on the death certificate" the same thing as "this death is included in covid-19 counts reported by NGOs/media"? Because I've noticed several news outlets in the UK reporting death counts with wording like "deaths of people who tested positive".
The PHE numbers are:
> The figures shown are deaths in NHS-commissioned services of patients who have had a positive test result for COVID-19. These are reported by the services to NHS England. NHS England extracts data at 5pm each day and are reported in the dashboard the following day. Following validation, the total number of deaths in England is published by NHS England. This is combined with death counts provided to DHSC by the devolved administrations to give a UK total which is published by DHSC. The devolved administrations may publish slightly different figures based on different cut-off times. Deaths outside NHS services are not included. Deaths of people who have had a positive test for COVID-19 could in some cases be due to a different cause.
They're talking about NHS England there, but they're taking numbers from Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland (the devolved administrations) to give a total for the UK.
These numbers will be higher because, like you've said, they're including people who die with as well as of covid-19. But they'll also be lower because they're not including people who die outside NHS hospitals. That means most people who die in care homes or hospices will not be counted.
The other numbers are from the Office for National Statistics. These are going to be higher because they include all death wherever it happens that a doctor has said is due to covid-19. There's a lag between the death and the reporting of about a week because it uses death certificate data and that takes time.
Here's a blog post from the Office for National Statistics about counting death: https://blog.ons.gov.uk/2020/03/31/counting-deaths-involving...