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Comment by eiji | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately your comparison leaves out a lot. We have a large percentage of covid19 infected people with no symthoms whatsoever. How does that square with your pack of wild dogs? I believe that is what is being pointed out here. You have asymptomatic elderly people dieing in their 70's and 80's, testing positive and their death being attributed to Covid19. It's not easy to tease that apart. But it's easy to dismiss as unreasonable to say. Asking if 20% of those death shouldn't be attributed to Covid19 is a valid question.

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We have a very reliable baseline number on how many people die per day. It’s completely reasonable to assume that all deaths in excess of that number are, directly or indirectly, caused by Covid.

No, we do not. Because every. single. other. thing. in society has changed in the past three months. We have evidence of people refusing to call emergency services due to fear of contracting covid. We have evidence of an increase in death that _can't_ be attributed to covid. There is really no comparison between now and last year at this time. Literally everything is different.

> We have evidence of people refusing to call emergency services due to fear of contracting covid.

Which is indirectly because of Covid, that's my whole point.

That is from our _response_ to Covid. One is within our control.

Let's say you rob a bank, and you get in a gunfight with the police. If the police accidentally shoot a bystander, you are charged with their homicide. That's because you were the root cause of that person being shot.

The same goes for coronavirus deaths - ultimately the excess mortality is due to the virus, even when those deaths are not directly attributable.

We do the same thing when calculating hurricane death tolls - you don't have to be hit by a flying tree to have your death count as a hurricane death, you could just as easily die because the power was out and your ventilator failed, or because your insulin supply ran out.

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