What Exactly is a Covid-19 Death?
Different ways of identifying who has actually died from Covid-19 is not as straight forward as it may seem, and the implications are huge
There is a common assumption in medical and epidemiology studies. Death is a hard endpoint. Meaning you can’t fudge if someone has died. However, the statistics associated with the coronavirus pandemic has given rise to an all important question. How exactly are Covid-19 “deaths” determined. Conspiracy theorists on both the left and right side of the political spectrum have ignited social media, and presidential health briefings, with accusations that the true death count has been either over or under counted. As a retired physician who has signed hundreds, maybe even thousands, of death certificates during my career, it is not as simple as it may seem. Unless you die from say a bullet to the head, in the end most diseases that result in death do so by having the lungs and or heart give out. In the case of Covid-19, the organ that usually fails and leads to death is the lungs. But death here is due to Covid-19 and not “lung failure.” Death certification differs from state to state, and country to country. However, most death certificates force the doctor to list only one cause of death. Yet they also allow two to three “contributing” causes. For the sake of this discussion, I will deal with only the main cause of death.
