COVID Excess Mortality Debate

Comments debate the accuracy of official COVID-19 death counts, frequently citing excess mortality data to argue whether deaths are undercounted, overcounted, or include other factors like comorbidities and indirect effects.

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Keywords

washingtonpost.com US Q2 SF O2 twitter.com CMP deaths.html U.S aljazeera.com deaths covid excess death mortality covid 19 disease 19 caused die

Sample Comments

nijave Jul 8, 2022 View on HN

Covid deaths are undercounted because not every death involves a covid test to verify cause?

GuB-42 Nov 12, 2020 View on HN

There are people who die from Covid and are not counted, there are people who die of something else and are counted as Covid deaths. And there are cases it is ambiguous, for example they may have recovered from Covid (negative PCR) but died later from complications.You will never have precise statistics, however, excess mortality for all causes more or less matches Covid deaths, so the numbers are roughly correct.Worth noting that there are indirect effects. For instance because of the ove

xorfish Apr 14, 2020 View on HN

Best data is excess mortality.Many deaths won't be attributed to covid19 but still caused by it.Here an explanation:https://twitter.com/firefoxx66/status/1249996541424816128

pests Aug 3, 2020 View on HN

The excess is already counting reported covid deaths.

NamTaf Jul 1, 2020 View on HN

As countless others have explained, this is an incredibly obtuse way of looking at it since they wouldn't have died in the nearly total majority of cases if it weren't for COVID.This is provably the case, since the average death rate is very steady year on year, yet shot up this year. People are dying in droves from something, and if not COVID then what do you propose? Hell, in reality the US and other countries are underreporting their figures, because there's st

r00fus Oct 18, 2020 View on HN

Would data about excess death vs COVID death prove the matter?

seemslegit Mar 16, 2020 View on HN

I don't think that cadavers would skew this much, only if a country is cheating by counting say a diabetic patient who died of covid19 as a diabetes death and not covid19 death.

seattle_spring Nov 28, 2023 View on HN

You can check the "excess death" stats to get a good idea. Unsurprisingly, they are pretty similar to the covid death stats.

jeffbee Dec 4, 2020 View on HN

I believe you've got it backwards. Many deaths that were probably attributable to COVID-19 were not recorded as caused by it. Excess mortality is much higher than reported deaths due to the disease. In the US some of this was caused by the fact that many COVID victims were just found already dead at their homes in places like New York.

klyrs Apr 7, 2023 View on HN

For whatever it's worth, covid death statistics are also flagged here.