Originally posted by reeftool I doubt we ever will know exactly. As long as the rules say any death can be claimed as covid 19 if there is a positive test result or "certain symptoms" exist in absence of a test, there will be death certificates issued so the hospitals can collect their money. We know the flu kills old people and even the common cold can. When my wife was in chemo treatment, we lived pretty much locked down back then because we knew how vulnerable chemo patients were. We spent all the holidays away from family that year. But when people with serious underlying conditions die, the reason for death is usually listed as complications due to whatever the condition was, whether it was cancer, asthma , COPD, etc. and not that they died of a "cold". But this year, they have allowed to blame covid 19 so hospitals can collect extra money from Medicare and Medicaid so we will likely never know the real death toll of relatively healthy people who die of covid 19. Write down covid 19, get an extra $13,000.
I know you believe that, but it isn't true. If you are actually interested in the real information, this is a page that gives a break down of it:
Hospital Payments and the COVID-19 Death Count - FactCheck.org Medicare pays based on DRG diagnosis filed with them. They do give an extra 20 percent to care for COVID patients. That has nothing to do with deaths at home or in other locations and no physicians are receiving extra compensation for putting this as a diagnosis on death certificates. It was put into place to make up the difference for the loss of revenue from cancelled care for non-COVID patients that had occurred for much of March and April.
As to the overall death toll, at the end of this crisis, the CDC is going to release a final, calculated tally based on increased deaths we have seen, just like they do at the end of influenza season. This number is likely to be quite a bit higher than the current numbers listed. Their web site currently shows NYC to have had 23,000 excess deaths since February 1st and New York State to have had 12,000 deaths since February 1st.
Excess Deaths Associated with COVID-19
I guess that I would say that this is a real crisis. It does affect folks who are over 70 worse than people younger than 70, but that doesn't mean that those lives aren't important or that those people's deaths were imminent without COVID.
---------- Post added 05-26-20 at 05:55 AM ----------
Originally posted by jcdoss From wikipedia: "Between March 11 and May 2 there were 32,107 deaths in the city; based on past data, this number was higher than expected by 24,172." It goes on to say that some 18k of those are "linked" to covid, some presumed without testing.
Don't doubt the disease can be deadly. How deadly, unfortunately, remains a real big question. It's hard to see huge numbers like this, while knowing at the same time that number is dwarfed by the number of infections that never develop symptoms. My wife and I took separate business trips in late February to DC and Atlanta, and we both got sick a week after we returned. Was that covid? Who knows?
We really need some good seroprevalence data.
NIH is currently doing studies. My father-in-law flew to Belize in February and came back really sick with a bad cough, fever that lasted for a week. They mailed him a kit to collect a blood sample that they will test for antibodies (he won't find out his personal result, but he is still pretty stoked to be doing it).
New York is doing antibody testing and preliminary results show 14 percent of state residents and 20 percent of NYC residents to have antibodies:
COVID-19 Testing | Department of Health
Indiana did testing and found that 2.8 percent of their population had antibodies.
There are still real issues, both with the tests (which are prone to false positives) and with the sampling (we tend to sample people who are more likely to have been exposed to COVID). This article kind of breaks down differences between state's approaches:
Do the Divergent Results of COVID-19 Antibody Studies Reflect Real Differences? – Reason.com I guess the big thing that all of these studies have brought home to me is that the prevalence in most of the US has been relatively low, even though the death toll has been high. Few of the people who had bad colds in January and February probably had COVID, based on the where we have seen outbreaks and levels of antibodies present now.
It would be wonderful if we did testing and found that 60 percent of most of the population had had this already and we were at herd immunity levels, but clearly that isn't the case anywhere, not even NYC.