The submitter's intended implication here is that deaths are being mis-coded as COVID-19 deaths to inflate the totals, but this is not supported by the page they linked to.
Given what we know about COVID-19's effects on the cardiovascular system, it's not surprising that COVID-19 deaths often involve heart attacks.
As for the 7.9k "accidents/suicides/poisonings" row, you're just misreading the table; what it actually says is "Intentional and unintentional injury, poisoning and other adverse events", with a list of ranges of ICD-10 codes. You can look these ICD-10 codes up on https://www.icd10data.com/ICD10CM/Codes/A00-B99. That "other adverse events" category includes a lot, including adverse effects of medications and complications from surgery.
I agree with you, but the one that doesn't make any sense to me is the ones coded as "Alzheimer disease"....8,253 deaths coded as that, but it's from COVID?
From the american heart association's website: "People often use these terms interchangeably, but they are not synonyms. A heart attack is when blood flow to the heart is blocked, and sudden cardiac arrest is when the heart malfunctions and suddenly stops beating unexpectedly."
Poster is probably to make a big deal that the CDC is inflating COVID deaths.
The way this chart works is that it lists all other conditions present (co-morbidities) in cases where the deceased is either confirmed and suspected to be suffering from COVID-19.
From once sense, inclusion of 8 thousand "accidents and suicides" is a "big deal", since the argument would be that COVID was not a primary contributor to those deaths, therefore inclusion of them in the COVID total is misleading.
It might be. But 8k out of 220k total is nitpicking.
26k heart attacks is a bigger slice of the pie, but it's also far more difficult to tease out if COVID contribute to heart attack deaths (I'd argue that it likely does). I'm sure there's some study somewhere that COVID significantly taxes the cardiovascular system and can result in meaningfully increased risk of heart attack deaths.
Covid is known to cause both inflammation of the heart and blood clotting. Saying that someone who was badly sick with covid who died of a heart attack “died of covid complications” is a statement that passes the sniff test.
Personally, I find the arguments over precise covid numbers a bit baffling. For comparison, there are battles between nation states within my lifetime where the estimate on how many combatants died range by over an order of magnitude. Not civilians killed in the area, enlisted soldiers. Getting accurate death counts is really, really hard, even in smaller organizations. Across all the counties in the US, mistakes will happen. In the end if a few thousand cases here and there get miscounted, I won’t be surprised in the slightest.
This web app is a useful resource to look at co-morbidities on each state. All of the data sources on here are sourced from the CDC: https://datatrackerapp.com
Given what we know about COVID-19's effects on the cardiovascular system, it's not surprising that COVID-19 deaths often involve heart attacks.
As for the 7.9k "accidents/suicides/poisonings" row, you're just misreading the table; what it actually says is "Intentional and unintentional injury, poisoning and other adverse events", with a list of ranges of ICD-10 codes. You can look these ICD-10 codes up on https://www.icd10data.com/ICD10CM/Codes/A00-B99. That "other adverse events" category includes a lot, including adverse effects of medications and complications from surgery.