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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]If Covid worsened their underlying condition, they still died from Covid.[/quote]

I don't think this is a useful definition.  Let's say a person has both covid and a heart condition and dies.  I could say "If Covid worsened their underlying condition, they died from Covid", but surely I could equally say "If a heart condition worsened their underlying condition, they died from a heart condition".  Should we record two deaths even though only one person died?

There is another problem here too, which is that covid appears to be a mild disease for the overwhelming majority of people - killing somewhere between 0.5 and 5 people per thousand. Imagine if we applied your maxim to herpes - we would end up claiming that 50% of all deaths are due to herpes which would clearly be ridiculous.  Given that covid is so mild we run the same risk.

So what we have always done throughout modern medical history is to allow the attending doctor to determine in his or her medical opinion what condition caused the patient's death.  The doctor weighs up the different factors and decides which was the primary cause, writes it on teh death certificate and lists other causes where he feels they may have been a factor.

For some reason, with covid we have thrown this seemingly very sensible mechanic out of the window, and instructed doctors to write covid on the death certificate for any patient who has recorded a positive covid test even if the doctor observed no covid symptoms and believed covid made no controbution to the patient's death.

And wose than that, we are then reporting all deaths as covid deaths even where it is not reported as the primary cause of the death on the patient's death certificate.

[quote]
  The question to ask is whether they would have died, absent a Covid infection.  If someone dies a couple of weeks after a Covid diagnosis, it seems extremely unlikely they died from an independent cause.[/quote]

This is not self evident at all and depends on the relative probabilities of different events.  Amongst the young the odds of covid being the cause of death (as compared to the odds of their having died from something else) is so small initially that it rmeains small even amongst the population of young people who have tested positive for covid - and most of them turn out to have died from something else.

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