Few people are familiar with the mechanics of death certificates and death certificate data. I happen to be one of them, having studied and written about end-of-life care in the Medicare program. I’m going to take a few minutes to try to clear up some absolutely unnecessary confusion regarding counts of COVID-19 deaths.
The CDC has been putting out statistics on COVID-19 deaths for months now. For some reason, the most recent weekly release has caught the eye of the right-wing nuts, starting with Fox News and working its way down the food chain. The statistic of interest is that only 6 percent of deaths with COVID-19 have COVID-19 as the only condition listed. And that 94% of deaths with COVID-19 have at least one other condition listed.
The implication that all of them seem to be trying to make is that COVID-19 itself isn’t that dangerous. It’s all that other stuff. And that’s just plain wrong, and comes from ignorance about how death certificates are filled out and how the resulting information is processed. Continue reading Post #793: Death certificate data and unnecessary confusion out of the CDC