Incorrect, they are absolutely counted as covid deaths early on and will likely be re-categorized later, your article even says as much - later corrections are easy for car crashes, but they are not easy for misdiagnosis

either way the context of the conversation is about early trends so my point still stands and is validated by the article you've linked, even.

Misdiagnosis can go either way, not always in favour of covid.

Early trends showed severe undercounting when later compared to excess mortality, probably due to low testing capacity at the start. See here for some more information on the undercounting: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...

You’ll have to point out in the previous article where it agrees with your point on car crashes counted as covid deaths, it does not show this in the version of the article that is presented to me.

your linked article simply shows gross deaths above baseline are not entirely accounted for by covid - that's not surprising in the least when you disrupt the entire world you'll have deaths from the disruption alongside covid. It makes no attempt at showing covid is undercounted.

If anything I would use that as an argument to show lockdowns may very well be doing substantial harm and causing massive death.

This hypothesis is further supported by the fact that not a single country in the top 30 excess mortality during the pandemic is a country that avoided stringent lockdowns.

Correlation != causation of course, but it's a logical thought to investigate and there's plenty more evidence towards lockdown's doing more harm than good (considering the evidence they prevented spread at all is lacking)

as for your request - I never said the article agrees with my point about car crashes counted as covid deaths, I said it agrees with me that the correction happens later.

You can easily disprove the “lockdowns doing more harm than good” from an excess mortality point of view by looking at countries such as Norway, which had had lockdowns but no significant excess mortality.

I also don’t understand the “evidence they prevented spread at all is lacking” line. We now have multiple waves in multiple countries. My country (Scotland) specifically has peaks in infections that are then followed by falls as a result of lockdowns. In fact we are now seeing infections rise as we ease restrictions again. These falls go against normal seasonal behaviours for respiratory illnesses, so it’s clear that something else is causing the fall - the lockdown!

The fact that a virus needs contact with people to spread is literally virus 101, and therefore limiting contact suppresses transmission - how do you come to the conclusion that this is not the case?

I responded to one of your other comments saying the same thing - norway did not have "lockdowns" like much of the developed world...sweden had more stringent lockdowns than norway. Either way a single datapoint doesn't prove anything, but you're wrong on even your single datapoint.

Lockdowns don't limit transmission because, in the US, only 40% of the economy shut down and traveling metrics didn't go down for very long. It's not that social distancing can't work - it's that it didn't work for likely very complex reasons.

I have replied to your assertions in the other comment thread.