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Comment by boredumb | Hacker News Reader

>The United States was roughly around the global average. Contrary to the view of many conservatives, the deaths probably were caused by Covid itself, and NOT by lockdowns

I feel like the common view by people who thought numbers were being artificially inflated was that they were counting people who died while having tested positive for covid being attributed to covid and not just 'the lockdowns'

Fairly distinctly remember a million memes of like a car accident or something else tragic and a caption of "sorry to tell you mam, your son died of covid" or something to that ends.

Also remember hearing attribution to FEMA and other world health organizations offering relief and funding based on a death being covid related or not and so the thought was it was easier to check that box and receive relief to your hospital and get the family's funeral expenses paid for.

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> thought numbers were being artificially inflated was that they were counting people who died while having tested positive for covid being attributed to covid

This objectively happened. Anyone who was COVID positive was being counted as a COVID death. It happened to my friend's dad- COVID was listed as the cause of death on his death certificate, v even though it was nothing to do with any illness at all, but rather an accident.

This practice varied by state and tracking eventually broke out death with COVID vs death by COVID.

> This objectively happened.

Sure.

As the article we're discussing states:

"In the US, the “fudge factor” is 1.13, which means our best guess is that 13% more Covid deaths took place than were officially reported.

For skeptics who can’t believe that deaths were under-counted: both things probably happened. A few cases were wrongly counted, but even more people may have died of Covid at home, without ever getting diagnosed."

> This practice varied by state and tracking eventually broke out death with COVID vs death by COVID.

Which involves a somewhat subjective, error-prone decisionmaking process. Early in the pandemic, when the vast majority of hospitalizations-with-COVID were due-to-covid, it made sense to just do the simple thing and assume COVID caused all the deaths. After the death rate fell and this became extremely confounding, it became important to make this somewhat subjective decision.

(e.g. a guy rolls up with a "heart attack" and is COVID positive. Is it due to COVID? SARS-CoV-2 both causes cardiac complications directly and can reduce blood oxygenation / increase heart workload, so heart attacks are more common with COVID infection).

Very eventually, yes. Specifically when larger covid death numbers stopped being politically useful.

Same. Family friend had a hunting accident and shot himself. Made it to the hospital, tested positive, died within a day or two from the gunshot. "Covid death."

I'm calling bullshit.

I can't speak to knowing this particular instance, but it wouldn't be surprising:

https://www.wbur.org/news/2022/03/10/new-covid-death-definit...

"From March 2020 to March 2021, DPH counted the death of any person who had previously tested positive for COVID-19 as a COVID-related death, regardless of how much time elapsed between those two events.

Even if someone contracted the virus in March and died in a car crash in July, they were added to the ongoing tally of pandemic deaths for that first year."

> Fairly distinctly remember a million memes of like a car accident or something else tragic and a caption of "sorry to tell you mam, your son died of covid" or something to that ends.

Those weren't just memes. That really happened. https://wpde.com/news/nation-world/man-who-died-in-motorcycl...

I think what they mean is, even at the time, people were tracking excess deaths above expected based on historical info (e.g. deaths might be higher in the winter so an increase or drop might be seasonal) and trying to decide how much of that excess was covid vs lockdown. The car-crash would be in the expected average deaths which had already been subtracted.

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