Hacker News Reader

Comment by kyrra | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that there are financial implications for a state saying they have covid deaths. From some of US covid relief packages, the more covid deaths a state had, the more money they get.

As well, you get the over-the-top cases where someone that dies of a gunshot is included in the covid death count[0].

Some states have tried to do better by breaking it down a little finer. Like Colorado provides[1] a breakdown down by confirmed vs probable. But the data here is still not great.

[0] https://www.kmov.com/news/colorado-coroner-calling-out-how-s...

[1] https://covid19.colorado.gov/data

View on HN

> As well, you get the over-the-top cases where someone that dies of a gunshot is included in the covid death count[0].

? It's incredibly clear by looking at Colorado's numbers, there was no misclassification at all. Definitely mistakes have been made, but this isn't even an example of one.

Your comment is bizarre. The same case you're criticizing is from the state you go on to praise in the next sentence. These, unequivocally, have never been included in "death by covid" counts.

> financial implications for a state saying they have covid deaths

Yes, but there are also immense legal, financial, and political implications for lying about covid deaths. There is no evidence of this happening on a widespread scale.

Prior to April 2020 the diagnostic criteria for a covid death required 0 testing whatsoever. Combine that with financial incentives to record something as covid, and the lack of other income for hospitals as patients wouldn't come for minor things and elective operations were cancelled and you have a perfect storm for bad data

Not going to keep arguing about this, but there are a huge number of different ways we can confirm that our counts are roughly accurate.

There are obvious signals in total excess death counts indicating the number of deaths due to covid, we can do retrospective random testing of early classified covid deaths.

There is no evidence of some systematic conspiracy or anything of the sort. I encourage you to consider that you might be engaging in motivated reasoning.

How can you retrospectively test the people who died prior to April? How can you confirm any of the data that was generated by guesswork?

I'm fairly sure there is no tissue available to test from any of those bodies

The situation was ripe for fraud, and there is no way to prove it didn't happen en masse. Human nature suggests it did happen. The evidence of what caused those deaths is destroyed shortly after the paperwork is filled out. The whole thing is set up in such a manner that suggests inflation of the numbers, and to have no way to counter the claims as all evidence is gone

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

It’s simply incentives, it doesn’t take a top-down conspiracy to have independent actors try to game a system in order to profit financially.

You do realize that 95% of COVID deaths have occured after April 2020, right?

The vast majority of deaths happened after April 2020, so even if those were all made up, it wouldn't affect the overall count much.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com