
Doctors and Nurses Say More People Are Dying of Covid-19 in the US Than We Know - aazaa
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nidhiprakash/coronavirus-update-dead-covid19-doctors-hospitals
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DoofusOfDeath
Article summary:

\- No claims of intentional undercounting.

\- Some undercounting likely because testing is reserved for living patients
where test results could affect how that patient is treated.

\- Some undercounting may be temporary because of lags in test-results /
reporting / tallying.

~~~
coder1001
Would this apply to pretty much all countries? Especially "testing is reserved
for living patients"? A lot of countries are struggling to test enough living
people.

~~~
loopz
Of course. If you're interested in detailed reporting, it gets fuzzy. False
positives, false negatives, not testing, losing results.. Most stats aren't
exact in many ways. This is NOT a US-specific phenomenon (healthcare is
Excellent, when provided), and in some cases cause of death was NOT COVID-19
either, despite positive test. For deaths, it is a bit better, since most
countries do keep tally in that area, but actual testing may vary wildly post
mortem.

For the "waiting for evidence"-crowd (inaction), this is bad news. There's
just no time when action is required NOW.

However, by buying time, we can ironically "wait for the evidence"!

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tunesmith
At least here in the states I have a hard time believing that we could have a
significant spike in deaths that are missed entirely. But maybe it's possible
that a death would be noticed and reported and handled through the proper
channels, but that the count of the death itself would just get missed. And
that we wouldn't notice until we compared deaths to population counts or
something.

Here's another interesting way it could be masked. Perhaps flu deaths are
decreasing substantially, but unnoticed covid deaths are being recorded as flu
deaths to make up the gap - we wouldn't notice the spike because it would just
be an absence of a dip. Maybe that wouldn't get noticed until our flu seasons
in future years are weirdly muted.

~~~
mcbits
I think the signal to look for is an increase in flu mortality rate in
February-May compared to October-January if that kind of data exists.
Confirmed flu cases are almost never also tested for COVID-19 due to the sheer
number of flu cases, but even a small percentage of those being doubled up
might change the mortality rate. They would also cause community spread
because people don't take the same precautions for "just the flu".

~~~
bagacrap
both flu and covid kill the same kind of people, very old and frail ones. So
in a sense they should be competitors, and they'll both kill fewer than if
either disease were the only one.

~~~
mcbits
Covid kills people who would survive the flu, so if someone catches both, they
would have a higher chance of dying than from the flu alone, which would
affect the flu's stats because these would be recorded as flu deaths.

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rbritton
The corollary is also true: more people are not dying of Covid-19 than we
know.

~~~
mirimir
True. And there are probably many more of them.

So altogether, inadequate testing underestimates incidence of infection, and
overestimates risk of death from infection.

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genofon
I think it would be useful to compare the mortality rate of a region with the
past years. Other than uncounted coronavirus death there are other emergencies
that cannot be throated properly in some heavily affected areas and that
increase the overall mortality rate.

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hashmymustache
That would surprise me greatly. The one example is an ER doc who says there
was 3 instead of 1 in a county? What is the implication here, complicit
participation of all healthcare workers in a political scheme to undersell
deaths while screaming for more resources? Incompetent testing? Poor
reporting? We report every death to the medical examiner regardless, this
would come up and be strictly tracked, even after the fact if the test results
later. Would be nice to have evidence of a discrepancy to go off, otherwise I
worry this just spreads fear.

~~~
NotTheDr01ds
Some of the confusion is that cases are reported in the county of _residence_
, not the county of the hospital where they are being treated. I've had to
correct multiple people who felt the "official numbers are wrong because Foo
Hospital in Bar County reported treating 'x' confirmed cases, but the state's
website only shows 'y' for Bar County.

It's likely that the doctor that was quoted in the article fell victim to that
misunderstanding.

On a related topic, it would be nice if the ER doctors, nurses, and hospitals
were doing a better job of reporting the county-of-residence. Here in Georgia,
we have 166 cases where the county is "unknown" (out of 1525) as of noon's
report.

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xbmcuser
A lot of people say China undercounted but according to WHO report China when
it was at peak infection had started counting as confirmed cases that showed
lung damage using chest scans instead of doing a proper test as they needed a
quick turnaround on test results. Which to me doesn't sound like they wanted
to hide the number of infected. Over the years I have realised we have western
propaganda and Chinese propaganda and the truth dies somewhere in between

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joduplessis
This feels somewhat sensationalist given the lack of evidence (other than
hearsay).

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altcognito
And a lot more will, which I find a bit odd given how important it will be for
Future planning. I get that it is mostly a waste of time to test a dead person
but it seems like they could at least be labeled presumed covid.

