Dr. Birx said in the press conference today that the US is counting any patient who dies with COVID-19 as dying of COVID-19. Are deaths during pandemics normally counted this way? Is it legitimate to call this number inflation—i.e., is there something fishy going on here—or is this standard practice?
Not a doctor, but it doesn’t seem fishy to me: most people do not die, most of the time. If you sample a random person it’s highly likely that they’ll survive the next two weeks. This is true even among high-risk groups (the elderly, obese, etc.). If you hear that someone died, and that they had a CV19 diagnosis, you should not put much weight on the hypothesis that they died of something unrelated, just because of this low base rate.
It makes more sense to worry about the opposite thing: people dying without formal CV19 diagnoses being excluded from the official statistics. For example, right now in New York about 200 people are dying at home each day, up from a baseline of 20 to 25, according to the city’s department of health: https://gothamist.com/news/surge-number-new-yorkers-dying-home-officials-suspect-undercount-covid-19-related-deaths These are not presently counted as CV19 deaths, but probably a lot of them are.
Dr. Birx said in the press conference today that the US is counting any patient who dies with COVID-19 as dying of COVID-19. Are deaths during pandemics normally counted this way? Is it legitimate to call this number inflation—i.e., is there something fishy going on here—or is this standard practice?
Not a doctor, but it doesn’t seem fishy to me: most people do not die, most of the time. If you sample a random person it’s highly likely that they’ll survive the next two weeks. This is true even among high-risk groups (the elderly, obese, etc.). If you hear that someone died, and that they had a CV19 diagnosis, you should not put much weight on the hypothesis that they died of something unrelated, just because of this low base rate.
It makes more sense to worry about the opposite thing: people dying without formal CV19 diagnoses being excluded from the official statistics. For example, right now in New York about 200 people are dying at home each day, up from a baseline of 20 to 25, according to the city’s department of health: https://gothamist.com/news/surge-number-new-yorkers-dying-home-officials-suspect-undercount-covid-19-related-deaths These are not presently counted as CV19 deaths, but probably a lot of them are.