I'm arguing that the comparison with AIDS that someone else made is an inaccurate one, since AIDS can shorten the life of someone that was healthy before they got it. Nobody in a hospice is healthy, and a large part of the ones that died with or by covid would have died within 30 days anyway.
If that were all there is to Covid, the excess mortality in Q2 should have been compensated by a reduction in Q3. While we do see such a reduction for Q3 in the numbers for Stockholm (which I cited in a sibling comment), it's too small to balance the tally.
It's not all there is to covid, but I think it's still worth observing. I mentioned in another comment that the total number of deaths in Sweden in 2020 up to November 1 is 3000 more than average the same period during 2015-2019. That's about half of the total number of official covid deaths.
Re:Sweden Covid-19 Update
by josephcsible on Thursday November 12, 2020 @03:49PM
(#25074805)
> So, your not arguing that people didn't die from Covid19, just that you think those people weren't expected to live for much longer? The implication being we shouldn't care so much because someone died only a year earlier?
I don't think this is what they're saying. I think the point is that those people's actual times of death weren't far enough from their expected times of death given their preexisting conditions to be able to confidently say that they died of Covid, rather than just having died with it. In other words, that there's a good chance they would have died at the exact same time even without Covid.
That's not how "cause of death" works. Doctors/Coroners don't just pick a cause randomly they look at how you died and actually investigate it if it can't be readily determined.
Presumably you think doctors have always been lying about cause of death? What do you think their motivation for that is?
It seems reasonable to create a statistical analysis based on years of expected life lost -- but that still doesn't mean people aren't dying from Covid19.
Aside, slightly tangential: Back in Feb/March BMJ had some controversy about UK government hiding excess Winter deaths in flu statistics. The implication being that the gov were taking more deaths over Winter and saying it was flu when in fact the deaths were more related to poverty (no heating, little food). Next thing we know people are saying Covid19 want a problem because it wasn't even as bad as flu (though at the time is was killing far more people as a proportion of those infected). Lies and statistics, and all that.