As far as I know the data currently includes also people who died with COVID (not because of COVID).
We will need to wait a few years to parse all this data and get the actual number.
We will need to wait a few years to parse all this data and get the actual number.
It may be true if you consider hospitalizations: sometimes people with mild or no COVID symptoms count as COVID hospitalizations because 1) they do need to be in the hospital for something unrelated but 2) they must be kept in a COVID ward until they're not infectious anymore.
However, death cause is not COVID if the hospital finds that you are positive after a car accident and you die of the injuries the day after.
And if you were already say very very old or with comorbidities, and you die of pneumonia with a positive COVID test, then maybe you would have died anyway in a couple months, but still the immediate cause of death is COVID and nothing else makes sense.
All I'm seeing is under reporting of covid deaths: Brazil: https://journals.plos.org/globalpublichealth/article?id=10.1... USA: https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/nation/2021/12/22/cov...
> and you die of pneumonia with a positive COVID test, then maybe you
> would have died anyway in a couple months, but still the immediate cause of
> death is COVID and nothing else makes sense.
I 100% agree if we go by what is written on their death certificate.
But...
For example in state of Massachusetts the COVID death definition includes anyone who has COVID listed as a cause of death on their death certificate, and any individual who has had a COVID-19 diagnosis within 60 days but does not have COVID listed as a cause of death on their death certificate [1].
CDC guidelines [2] are 100% clear but the problem is that we started counting also people which do not have COVID listed in certificate signed by doctor. I do not know - kinda crap.
The California rules are kinda interesting also [3]:
• The decedent had confirmatory laboratory evidence for SARS-CoV-2 (i.e. detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in a clinical or autopsy specimen using a molecular amplification test) AND at least ONE of the following criteria is met:
- A case investigation determined that COVID-19 was the cause of death or contributed to the death.
- The death certificate indicates COVID-19 or an equivalent term as one of the causes of death, regardless of the time elapsed since specimen collection of the confirmatory laboratory test used to define the case.
- The death occurred within 30 days of specimen collection for the confirmatory laboratory test used to define the case and was due to natural causes
In other words, if somebody dies within 30 days of being tested for COVID and death was due to natural causes then the death is counted as COVID death. Even if it is not on the death certificate.
[1] https://www.mass.gov/news/department-of-public-health-update...
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvss/vsrg/vsrg03-508.pdf
[3] https://www.co.shasta.ca.us/docs/libraries/shasta-ready-docs...
I realize this site has global users but the parent comment was correct. Not sure why he's being downvoted.
This is not at all an accurate summary of the CDC’s Cause of Death reporting guidelines for Covid-19: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvss/vsrg/vsrg03-508.pdf
If you die in a car accident with Covid-19 in your system, the UCOD is massive trauma from car accident, not “Covid-19”. The CDC reporting guidelines make it clear that Covid only rises to the level of UCOD if it meets the criteria of “ (a) the disease or injury which initiated the train of morbid events leading directly to death”
So I bet that California has overreported number of deaths while Florida has underreported.
I also did not believe this.
The claim was specifically about CDC reporting rules, not the rules of how individual states report statistics themselves (which the CDC has no control over).