> “Someone who’s dying from a bad pneumonia will ultimately die because the heart stops,” said Dr. Robert Bonow, a professor of cardiology at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and editor of the medical journal JAMA Cardiology. “You can’t get enough oxygen into your system and things go haywire.”

> But Bonow and many other cardiac specialists believe a COVID-19 infection could lead to damage to the heart in four or five ways. Some patients, they say, might be affected by more than one of those pathways at once.

> ...But Bonow said the damage observed in COVID-19 patients could be from the virus directly infecting the heart muscle. Initial research suggests the coronavirus attaches to certain receptors in the lungs, and those same receptors are found in heart muscle as well.

> In March, doctors from China published two studies that gave the first glimpse at how prevalent cardiac problems were among patients with COVID-19 illness. The larger of the two studies looked at 416 hospitalized patients. The researchers found that 19% showed signs of heart damage. And those who did were significantly more likely to die: 51% of those with heart damage died versus 4.5% who did not have it.

> ...That work has already resulted in changes in the way hospitals deal with the cardiac implications of COVID-19. Doctors have found that the infection can mimic a heart attack. They have taken patients to the cardiac catheterization lab to clear a suspected blockage, only to find the patient wasn’t really experiencing a heart attack but had COVID-19.

I think it's impossible (with the current state of technology) to determine the actual cause in patients with comorbidities. The patients died _with_ coronavirus in these statistics rather than _from_ coronavirus.

Anyway, it's hard to argue with those people. But if you look at the average deaths a country has per month, and see the increase because of Covid, you should be able to infer something is wrong with just a bit of common sense.

Heart failure causes a drop of oxygen in the blood, which leads to multiple organ failure. Direct cause of death is often kidney shutdown.

People have a tendency to look for 'one' cause for an outcome. Sometimes there's just multiple causes I think.

You have read incorrect information. Only deaths "where the disease caused or is assumed to have caused or contributed to death" [1].

Of course, there will be errors. As with any number, especially one reported daily.

BTW: there are also reasons for COVID deaths being underreported, so the bias in the number isn't really one way.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvss/coronavirus/Alert-2-New-I...

This is the difference between proximate and ultimate causes.

However there is also a good chance that even if covid-19 isn't the only contributor to a person's death. For example a person with heart disease can extract enough O2 from the air to live but because of there disease they are below the normal human amount. Then comes along covid-19 with futher reduces their body's effectiveness and the person doesn't have enought air to live.

Nothing you can do can convince them that the coronavirus is real. They fundamentally deny that it exists even as it knocks on their door.

https://theweek.com/speedreads/907411/youtube-bans-coronavir...

When someone has a heart attack and dies how do we know they had covid-19? We're mostly not testing people. We don't test the dead people. So we know or suspect they have covid-19 before they die. This is not a bunch of asymptomatic people dropping dead from expected causes then being labelled as covid-19 deaths, it's a bunch of people with severe symptoms who are dying and having multiple causes listed on the certificate, one of which will be covid-19.

Here's a useful thread that looks at the "they would have died anyway" comments: https://twitter.com/ActuaryByDay/status/1246866119597621248

> now that currently if someone dies, say on Heart Disease, and has positively tested on Covid-19, that the death cause is counted as Covid-19.

We know that covid-19 causes myocarditis, and that this is a significant cause of death for lots of covid-19 patients.

Covid deaths in healthy people and

Covid-related with comorbidity deaths.

When you're lying on your deathbed drowning in the effluvia of necrotic lung tissue at least you can rest easy in the knowledge that your humanity didn't count and you're just a statistic, but at least you helped a wealthy person avoid not making as much money as he could have.

If we know that one part of the population can withstand the disease well and another is susceptible to it we can develop ways to navigate that.