Hacker News Reader

Comment by this_steve_j | Hacker News Reader

The study authors concluded: collectively, these two states could have averted more than 95,000 hospital admissions and 22,000 deaths had they reached the vaccination coverage achieved by the top five states and continued at the same pace from October 2020 until August 2021.

View on HN

Did they correct for COVID deaths by motorcycle accident, gunshot wound, and heart attack? I don't think a vaccine would have prevented those deaths.

> As the CDC report notes, “For 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned.” In other words, 94 percent of Americans who have died from coronavirus from the week ending February 1, 2020 to the week ending August 22, 2020 had, on average, almost three comorbidities that played a role in their death.

> Anecdotally, there are several stories of cases in which people with COVID-19 had deadly heart attacks, yet these cases were coded as COVID-19 deaths. In one extreme case, a Florida man who died in a motorcycle crash happened to also have COVID-19 at the time, yet was coded as having died from COVID-19, not because of the motorcycle accident.

https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/514915-is-us-covid-19...

More than 1.2 million people died of Covid in the US. Motorcycle accidents could not have accounted for more than 6,000 of those. We have good estimates of excess deaths (deaths over the expected numbers of heart attacks and other causes), that suggest the 1.2 million is an underestimate.

But we desperately need an honest, transparent, review of coding versus reality.

There was a (lancet?) submission reviewing autopsies, but that was rejected. It came to some pretty stark conclusions, so it was either questionable outright, or perhaps getting too close to the truth. I hope the former, but I can’t help but wonder if it might be the latter.

At present, data is too opaque. And it’s not the kind of data that can be shared openly — too personally identifying, and too private. So I can see why it’s not happened. But at the same time, there’s too much politicisation to take the current figures as a reliable indicator. So something needs to happen.

It is not clear to me how desperate the need is. It is not hard to find examples of things that, at first glance, seem clearly nonsensical. But some examples may be miscoded and corrected later, while other examples are simply misunderstandings of the common use of the code. This seems to be the primary strategy for election deniers. But even if a tree is actually a large bush, forests still exist. We can predict with reasonable accuracy how many people will die of the most common causes, because the numbers are big. That is the strength of excess death estimates. I do not think there is much disagreement over most of these statistics by people who understand the estimation process.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com