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[mko]

They're not hiding the deaths they're just labeling them differently.

Then how many Coronavirus deaths were labeled pneumonia deaths and thus not part the official count?

Probably many. Its happening everywhere. We are missing hundreds of deaths. And probably hundreds of thousands of diagnosis.

Chances are we will never know

Likely real total death count cab be estimated by calculating excess death count. But it lumps together direct Covid19 deaths, death caused/avoided by shutdowns, deaths indirectly caused by overloaded hospitals...

Ut can be adjusted (for example to dicount reduced deaths in traffic accidents), but see "statistics is hard" part.

[Reelya]

They're not hiding the deaths they're just labeling them differently.

Then how many Coronavirus deaths were labeled pneumonia deaths and thus not part the official count?

that's definitely a possibility, but as many previous year's "flu death" figures demonstrate, that's not something they started doing this year, it seems to be normal procedure in China to list the proximate cause of death certificates. So that would indicate that there wasn't really any political pressure to "not list coronavirus" on death certificates, because that's not how they fill out those certificates in the first place.

So they need a coronavirus death tally, but that doesn't mean they need to change how they fill out the death certificates, they should just keep the tally separately and not base it on what's written on death certificates. I don't personally know how they keep the tally, so the point that some people said they got a death certificate listing pneumonia might be entirely irrelevant to how the figures are being tracked. If someone is tested positive then dies of pneumonia, then keep track of them as a coronavirus death. The complaint was that some people who were never tested died, and were listed as pneumonia early in the piece. However, in those cases it would be irresponsible to add them to any official tally: you're going to get false positives and false negatives, and most people dying of pneumonia are still from the flu.

[ChairmanPoo]

... I can tell you death certificates are a bit shitty in general. You have to summarize very complex medical histories in three or four phrases. It lends itself to misunderstandings.

[mko]

... I can tell you death certificates are a bit shitty in general. You have to summarize very complex medical histories in three or four phrases. It lends itself to misunderstandings.

And it can impact people in various ways. See suicides classified as accidents.

[Reelya]

Suicides classified as accidents doesn't actually hurt anyone, except for under-reporting suicides.

The person who committed suicide is already dead, so they no longer care how it's classified, and their loved-ones are probably better off thinking it was an accident.

[ChairmanPoo]

Suicides classified as accidents doesn't actually hurt anyone, except for under-reporting suicides.

That can hurt people.

But anyway I was thinking  more on both problems on how you write it and how the guy coding it reads it.

For instance. In the ROI you have to list an immediate cause of desth and a "chain of causes". Eg  pneumonia -> neutropaenia in the context of chemotherapy -> acute myeloid leukaemia -> secondary myelodisplastic syndrome.

Now, my question, and one which tbh to this date I'd not bothered too much with, is how this is coded afterwards. Do they code it as a pneumonia death? A leukaemia death? Treatment related?

[Teneb]

Official death count for Brazil has hit 114. It begins.

[Reelya]

The measures in Australia are thankfully having an impact. There's been a steady drop in new cases for the last week or so, down by about half.

[mko]

On topic of measures having an impact...

"Thomas Schaefer, the finance minister of Germany's Hesse state, has committed suicide apparently after becoming "deeply worried" over how to cope with the economic fallout from the coronavirus, state premier Volker Bouffier said Sunday.

Schaefer, 54, was found dead near a railway track on Saturday. The Wiesbaden prosecution's office said they believe he died by suicide."

https://gulfnews.com/world/europe/german-minister-commits-suicide-after-coronavirus-crisis-worries-1.1585484975297

[ChairmanPoo]

https://saludineroap.blogspot.com/2020/03/la-primera-no-verdad-de-la-pandemia-del.html?m=1
In spanish but probably runs through google translate.

It explains a few of the tremendous lies that healthcare professionals were told about this epidemic.

[thompson]

Going back to the early discussion, the 20-40k flu deaths in the US aren’t measured from death certificates. It’s calculated from the “excess mortality” during the flu season. That is, how many more overall deaths you see during the flu season relative to comparable periods outside the flu season. Reason is simple enough: of a person has leukaemia but gets the flu and dies, is it a flu death or a leukaemia death? Leukaemia is a damn sight more dangerous than the flu, so it’s almost silly to classify it as an influenza death. But the flu might have pushed them over the edge. China probably has excess mortality studies to estimate flu deaths as well. It’s all very well not to trust Chinese statistics, but let’s be sensible about it.

[ChairmanPoo]

Going back to the early discussion, the 20-40k flu deaths in the US aren’t measured from death certificates. It’s calculated from the “excess mortality” during the flu season. That is, how many more overall deaths you see during the flu season relative to comparable periods outside the flu season. Reason is simple enough: of a person has leukaemia but gets the flu and dies, is it a flu death or a leukaemia death? Leukaemia is a damn sight more dangerous than the flu, so it’s almost silly to classify it as an influenza death. But the flu might have pushed them over the edge. China probably has excess mortality studies to estimate flu deaths as well. It’s all very well not to trust Chinese statistics, but let’s be sensible about it.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/overview.htm

According to this, this is what they are doing

(NCHS) mortality surveillance data – NCHS collects death certificate data from state vital statistics offices for all deaths occurring in the United States. Pneumonia and influenza (P&I) deaths are identified based on ICD-10 multiple cause of death codes.  NCHS surveillance data are aggregated by the week of death occurrence.  To allow for collection of enough data to produce a stable P&I percentage, NCHS surveillance data are released one week after the week of death.  The NCHS surveillance data are used to calculate the percent of all deaths occurring in a given week that had pneumonia and/or influenza listed as a cause of death. The P&I percentage for earlier weeks are continually revised and may increase or decrease as new and updated death certificate data are received from the states by NCHS.  The P&I percentage is compared to a seasonal baseline of P&I deaths that is calculated using a periodic regression model incorporating a robust regression procedure applied to data from the previous five years.  An increase of 1.645 standard deviations above the seasonal baseline of P&I deaths is considered the “epidemic threshold,” i.e., the point at which the observed proportion of deaths attributed to pneumonia or influenza was significantly higher than would be expected at that time of the year in the absence of substantial influenza-related mortality.

Tbh I'm thinking that... I dont know how death certificates are in the US but like I said before, in Europe they are fairly free form. Dependimg on what is written in, and how however is om the other end codes in... I think cases might be missed out.

Also btw: I'd say that saying leukaemia is more important than the flu... I dont know this is all relative to what you're measuring. For the guy who has leukaemia its clear what his biggest problem is and what might complicate the rest. But leukaemia is not contagious. While the flu is...

It's funny how I'd never stopped to consider the underlying paperwork and number crunching of fatality reports, or at least hadnt for a long time.

[thompson]

So, are the 20-40k numbers coming from the CDC? I have mostly seen those specific high estimates from excess mortality studies performed by Universities, and (wrongly?) assumed that was the standard approach for getting the larger numbers. Happy to be corrected on this.

[Frumple]

Hey, I checked the testing numbers! Florida's up to almost a whole fourth of a percent of the population tested!

hahaha so many people's gonna' die and the officials in this fucking state are just going to go ~who can say what happened to them~

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Florida missed out so hard on Andrew Gillum. Could have had a governor who was a progressive and a connoisseur of meth-fueled bisexual orgies during this crisis, as opposed to Ron "Can the treasury bear such expense?" DeSantis.

Who's very name will apparently prompt Google to give you a COVID-19 warning box. Oh well, into the Gulf it goes.