Yet Another Reason Covid Death Counts Cannot Be Trusted
"The medical coding system was designed to maximize billing for physician services, not to collect national health statistics, as it is currently being used.”
If you've heard about the many deaths that have been wrongly attributed to COVID-19 and wondered how it's possible that this happens, this article from John Hopkins may shed a bit of light. From the article:
"The medical coding system was designed to maximize billing for physician services, not to collect national health statistics, as it is currently being used.”
To be clear, I believe there are many people who have fallen ill with COVID-19, and I know people have lost loved ones to the disease. But I am increasingly concerned because public perception of the severity of the disease—and government policies intended to mitigate the threat—are based in large part on the number of deaths and corresponding death rate (and rightly so). But if the death toll has been inflated, then the public's perception of the threat may also be greater than it should be. This is especially concerning because it's not only the egregious cases of mislabeling (e.g., motorcycle crash, gun shot wound, etc.) that have inflated the death toll; it's also the many who have died "with" COVID and not "from" COVID. The following 43-second clip from Dr. Ngozi Ezike, Director of the Illinois Department of Public Health, explains this distinction:
Combine the incorrect or inflated numbers with constant coverage of the number of cases and deaths, and it's possible (I would argue probable) that the fear of the disease is not proportionate to the actual threat.
Again, I am NOT saying that COVID-19 is not a threat; it is a serious illness and should be treated as such. But the data surrounding the illness continues to show that the threat was indeed seriously overblown in the beginning, and the current best estimates from many international studies show that the risk of death is very close to a severe seasonal influenza (and even a mild influenza in some nations). For an excellent summary of the most recent research (with links to studies) on the infection fatality rate, asymptomatic cases, possible treatments, contact tracing, and more, see this link: