Booray said:
BusyTarpDuster2017 said:
Booray said:
As far as I can tell, the uproar is over this:
Doctors are being told to list Covid as a cause of death if they believe Covid was a cause of death. Note "a" not "the."
Help me out here...I'm not understanding why the "a" vs "the" is even relevant. Should doctors even be declaring a or the cause of death based on what they "believe", without actual laboratory confirmation? And if these declarations are being used to tally Covid-19 deaths, which are in turn reported to the public, wouldn't that matter?
Frequently death certificates list multiple causes of death. So for someone suffering from pneumonia who contracts Covid 19 which then exacerbates respiratory distress to the point of death, listing both pneumonia and Covid 19 as "a" cause of death would be appropriate. Listing either without the other as "the" cause of death would be inappropriate.
Which leads to the second part of your question. Should a coroner list "a" cause as being Covid 19 without lab confirmation? You would have to ask a forensic pathologist that question, but I do know that coroners often draw conclusions from non-lab evidence: was the death accidental or suicide? The bullet wound did the same damage, looks the same on the autopsy. But the coroner may use other clues to reach a conclusion or say that he/she can not reach a conclusion.
In this instance it seems to be the guidance is for the doctors to use their judgment in informing the cause of death. Given the circumstances, I do not think that is unreasonable as long as all contributing factors are also listed.
There seems to be a push from the right to say that the only Covid deaths are those that killed an otherwise healthy person. That is not the way it should work and it is not the way it has ever worked, because the world is full of unhealthy people.
You are missing on this answer- in your first paragraph,
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So for someone suffering from pneumonia who contracts Covid 19...
Did they, or did they not ACTUALLY contract Covid-19? That's the point here. How do they know it wasn't the regular flu, or streptococcal pneumonia? Example- can you list cancer as a cause of death, without even a formal diagnosis of cancer, or a laboratory/pathology confirmation of it? As the doctor in the video stated, that's the irregularity here- you can't list influenza as the cause of someone's respiratory illness without actually confirming that's what it was, so why can you with the coronavirus?
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You would have to ask a forensic pathologist that question, but I do know that coroners often draw conclusions from non-lab evidence: was the death accidental or suicide? The bullet wound did the same damage, looks the same on the autopsy
Comparing a diagnosis of an infectious disease to the cause of a gunshot death being suicide vs. accidental is completely invalid. Claiming an infectious agent was present is definitively proven by a
single laboratory test. Not so with determining suicide vs. accidental gunshot wounds. A better analogy using your gunshot death example, would be to claim that because someone who was found bleeding from the head, and there was a gun nearby, that the cause of death was a bullet to the head.... without even establishing that there is indeed a bullet inside that person's head!
No?
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There seems to be a push from the right to say that the only Covid deaths are those that killed an otherwise healthy person. That is not the way it should work and it is not the way it has ever worked, because the world is full of unhealthy people.
That's not even what the point is here. You completely missed it, and I'm confused as to how.