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Comment by piva00 | Hacker News Reader

Sweden's death counts are the most statistical precise ones so far, exactly because every death from someone tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 is counted as a death from CoViD-19. No other country is doing this, you can check that by following metrics such as "excess deaths" after seasonally adjusting deaths by country and adding their official death tolls [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22945974

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>>> Sweden's death counts are the most statistical precise ones so far, exactly because every death from someone tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 is counted as a death from CoViD-19.

So if the 95 years old who already withstood 3 heart attacks dies from the 4th one, and he tests positive for SARS-CoV-2 you then blame his death on CoVID-19, and not on his weak heart? Doesn't make much sense to me.

It makes sense when you think that this removes the individual variation per hospital/doctor writing a death certificate, you don't rely on professional opinion, you count all of them as it is easier to later clean this statistic with models based on historical data than the opposite (to figure out the missing data for deaths from CoViD-19 after the fact).

You need to be aware that Sweden has a long history of keeping demographical statistics [0] so there is a method to the apparent madness of counting.

[0] https://www.scb.se/en/About-us/main-activity/history-of-stat...

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