> I've heard people tell me that when COVID started the hospitals started marking everyone who died as having COVID regardless of what the real cause was.

From what I've heard, it went both ways, depending on the point in time. E.g. Poland had an election coming up mid-pandemic, and around that period, many people believed the government is underreporting COVID deaths, by making doctors classify them as caused by any of the comorbidities present in the deceased (and past certain age, pretty much everyone had some comorbidity, e.g. a weak cardiovascular system, or cancer).

COVID statistics were always heavily politicized. I think the most reliable way of getting to the truth was, and still is, looking at the excess death counts (i.e. how many more people died in a given month over the average of deaths in that month in last few pre-pandemic years).

Even comparing excess deaths can be misleading, because you're comparing deaths during lockdown to deaths in previous years not in lockdown. In other words, you're not isolating a single variable (SARS-CoV-2 pandemic vs no pandemic) but rather multiple (pandemic plus non pharmaceutical interventions vs no pandemic).

We can sanity check the number fairly easily. COVID has a case fatality rate of ~0.5%, so if everyone in the US had caught the coronavirus there would be around 150k excess deaths. Probably multiply that by a 80% fudge factor to at least acknowledge that some of people who die of COVID were probably frail to start with and likely to get taken out by normal disease and aging.

0.5% of 300,000,000 is 1.5 million dead.

The important bit is the number of excess deaths, which is higher than previous 5 years' averages.

To draw a parellel, if someone started getting more tips at the restaurn they worked at, or more Tinder matches than usual, they should notice "Hey, something's changed..." and wonder what the reason behind it is..

There may have been some shenanigans, of course, but some of the claims I heard came from misunderstanding the hospital classifications.

Hospitals got economic relief from Covid because they couldn't take in other patients for fear of the contagiousness of Covid. So they got "credit" for "Covid patients" for financial reimbursement claim purposes.

But that wasn't the "cause of death" on the death certificate. The COD was listed as whatever it was.

There looked to be some deliberate attempt to conflate these assignments in the minds of people by some bad actors last year.

But again, that's not saying that it didn't happen. But when it was being talked about last year it seemed like it was being used for political purposes.

I've heard that often enough from a family member, often condensed into "they didn't die of COVID, they died with COVID" (which let to the obvious shot back later that year from me being "they didn't die of the vaccine, they died with the vaccine").

There is obvious borderline cases when COVID merely accelerated another disease (heart failure), but I bet in 99% of cases, the ultimate cause of death is one or multiple organ failure due to COVID.

The thing these graphs show (and I agree with the criticism that plotting it in polar makes the excess volume look much larger) is that you can completely ignore why anyone died and still see a very clear pattern that 2020 stands out as very different than previous years, and the plot of the delta between 2020 and those other years exactly matches the numbers that CDC attributes to COVID-19.

In other words, even if you question their categorization of deaths, it’s impossible to deny that something out of the ordinary caused 600k excess deaths in the US, and that “something” happened to coincide perfectly with the COVID-19 surges.

The problem is, that some countries do not report covid properly, because its "defeated" and thus no longer allowed to appear in propaganda. Covid still exists, but is written down as pneumonia - or another "wasting" disease.

This creates the illusion, if one takes those countries media for real, that in other countries the disease is not as ravaging or non-existant. One should trust democratic countries data more and signal distrust on data/ positions / declarations from authoritarian regimes.

This however is not happening much on online plattforms, were one dictators "cheerful" lies are equally loud represented next to a loyal servant of a democratic state giving "grim" news.

The platforms thus help to creates the impression, that authoritarian regimes are dealing "better" with the situation and those wishing for a return to the "before" times, seeing those before times seemingly alive, thus steer towards totalitarian propaganda.

Lies for money subvert the system allowing to sell lies for money as a business model.

This problem solves itself.

If a government is caught lying, its previous statements to a fact should be auto-corrected and future statements be overwritten with a extrapolated truth, given by someone proofen to be trust worthy.