Thus for example, if you test postive for COVID19, but die from massive blood loss from the car accident that brought you to the hospital in the first place, you are recorded as dying from blood loss, not COVID19. If you have stage 4 cancer and a few weeks to live, and also have COVID19, and you die in a few weeks, you are recorded as dying from cancer, not COVID19.
If someone has terminal cancer and is told they have a month to live, but contract Covid and only last 3 weeks, what do you put down? Was it the Covid that killed them?
This is something the medical profession has been dealing with pretty much forever. There is no reason to believe that suddenly there is a conspiracy to change how they handle reporting.
That said, hospitals get a bigger payment if the patient has COVID, so they have a very strong incentive to diagnose it.
It gets mucky if they have lung cancer, but I think it's such a tiny fraction of cases that have terminal lung cancer which will kill them in very few weeks _and_ the severe case of COVID-19.
What does that mean? Respiratory failure? Plenty of diseases cause death through respiratory failure.
It's not that straight forward to determine cause of death in patients with comorbidities.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/05/us/coronaviru...
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav...
So what's going on? Either hospitals aren't actually over-counting. Or they are, and COVID is still undercounted. Or the year-over-year numbers are wrong. Which do you think it is?
In all of those three world, hospital incentives are uninteresting. Why bring them up?
There may be cases where people get mislabeled (it's hard to determine what the exact source of death is, especially since COVID doesn't kill directly), but I would be hesitant to ascribe intentional mislabel to people.