Hacker News Reader

Comment by dilap | Hacker News Reader

Death attribution can vary; I think deaths themselves -- as in, how many people have died, from any cause -- should be fairly reliable and comparable.

So for the clearest, most unbiased picture of COVID impact, calculate % increase over normal death rate by country, and then compare that.

(I guess. Just spitballing.)

View on HN

Deaths even within the US have wildly different criteria for being counted:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/which-deaths-c...

The suggestion you are responding to is not suggesting counting covid deaths.

It's suggesting we track all deaths/ Then we look at the increase in average deaths. Based on the trends we should be able to estimate how many additional (likely covid) deaths we have incurred during the crisis

The obvious problem there is the safer at home laws and lack of socializing would have an impact on your average deaths in the opposite direction. So comparing average deaths in the past to now are apples and oranges.

Yes, the unadjusted number you get will be a lower-bound. You could then try to get closer to the real number by noticing, e.g., how much car crashes were reduced and adjusting for that.

Exactly the increase in "all cause mortality" is the most honest we have at this point. But they say that number often gets adjusted in the weeks after (not sure why that is happening or acceptable).

From all my calculations i find one thing: we've been lied to a lot in the past few weeks.

People normally don't care about realtime death stats, so in many places there is a delay on reporting because nobody ever cared about doing it any other way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com