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Comment by 234523452536456 | Hacker News Reader

The first sentence is:

>The death toll from coronavirus may be almost 60 per cent higher than reported in official counts, according to an FT analysis of overall fatalities during the pandemic in 14 countries.

The article is about reported deaths, not predicted. I doubt many countries are reporting artificially high counts.

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_Supposedly_ American hospitals are financially incentivized to count deaths as coronavirus if possible.

Has there been any actual evidence of this? What is the mechanism by which they get paid this way?

As the part of the CARES laws feds backstopped hospital expenses associated with COVID-19 treatment. As soon as the emergency was declared administrators knew at some point it would be paid.

Fair enough, but it's a long way from there to suggesting that there is intentional misclassification. Anything other than a general cynicism to back this?

from the article :

To calculate excess deaths, the FT has compared deaths from _all causes_ in the weeks of a location’s outbreak in March and April 2020 to the average for the same period between 2015 and 2019.

so they are not counting only coronavirus related deaths but all

I would assume corona-side-effects (depression and domestic violence because of forced isolation, deaths from other causes due to lack of medical workers, stress, less healthy lifestyle, economic reasons,...?) to be a major factor too. It will be interesting to see if anyone has the courage to investigate all the causes of deaths when (if?) this madness is over.

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