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Comment by tcbawo | Hacker News Reader

Some people have argued that hospitals are skewing the numbers to inflate the number of people that are dying of Covid-19 vs other causes, or that these are people that would died anyways. Neither of these arguments are supported by the FT data. To be fair, it's not clear how to quantify people that might be dying due to lockdown-related causes (eg. suicide, untreated health issues), but this appears to be smaller than Covid-19 deaths.

Edit: I'm curious why this is getting downvoted.

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I didn't downvote, but I can see why.

It seems like you didn't read the FT graph. It's showing the total death rates in a graph, and during initial spike in COVID, Sweden showed 20% increase during the peak. By definition, there's no "skewing" possible, since it's all death - unless you're claiming hospitals are making up death.

If your main point is that reported death due to COVID might be inflated, sure, that's possible but that doesn't mean there's no increase due to COVID related death. If you want to point out the reported number due to COVID might be slightly higher than it really is, you should at least acknowledge that there is meaningful and substantial increase in death due to COVID as there absolutely is. By omitting that, your post can't be distinguished from someone posting with a conspiracy mindset and ignoring actual data on substantial increase in death.

Clearly, I must not have articulated myself well enough, since you took away the exact opposite of my point: I have heard the suggestion of inflated death numbers within the US in casual conversation multiple times and I frequently refer to this specific article as a counterargument.

Fwiw - I have been a subscriber to the FT for ages and I've followed that chart (which is free to all) since the beginning.

The inflated death numbers thing is Fox News disinformation.

I think you're post was pretty clear. "Some people argue that X, but the data doesn't support X." Sometimes there can be a tendency for people to skim posts and try to quickly box people into Team A or Team B. It's not unlikely that some people read your first sentence (or even the first half of your first sentence) and pegged you for having a particular position without paying attention to the whole thing.

I think you're being downvoted because it can be confusing sometimes when someone replies to a post in agreement, it's much more natural on the internet for replies to be a disagreement. This makes it really easy to read your first sentence as something you are proposing rather than referencing, which makes the whole post rather confusing if not read more carefully.

> Some people have argued that hospitals are skewing the numbers to inflate the number of people that are dying of Covid-19 vs other causes

This is a common theory in the US as well, where the accusation of "they are doing it for money" is most repeated. It's ridiculous and untrue, but that's the logic here.

What could even a theoretical justification for hospitals inflating numbers in a fully government-run system ?

I'll be briefer than the other reply.

The FT excess mortality graph doesn't care whether anything is flagged as a COVID death or not. If there's a lethal pandemic, you don't need to rely on doctors classifying deaths, you can see it in the total number of deaths from all causes.

That's exactly what they are saying.

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