If someone is driving along, minding their own business and a mac truck jumps the median and slams into their Prius killing that driver, but the doctor suspects that the Prius driver has Covid 19, would it be appropriate for that doctor to list Covid 19 as a cause of death? Or even a contributing cause of death?Booray said: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.BusyTarpDuster2017 said: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?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."
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.
If there is going to regulation or law or orders or money being handed out by the trillions, I don't think it's unreasonable to have a set of standards for listing the cause of death, instead of just leaving it up to the doctor. So yes, at the very least, lab confirmation should be a requirement and even then in my example, even if the doctor has lab confirmation about Covid 19, the debate isn't over of about the driver's death.
Likewise, from the left their seems to be a push to label all these death as a result of coronavirus... that's right coronavirus which contains subset of viruses including Covid 19 and the common cold.... I've seen some pretty high numbers being attributed to death by coronavirus (not Covid 19), which seems to be honest misinformation at best or manipulation of facts at worst.
With the gov't now willing to toss around trillion of dollars like they just hit the jackpot on the world's biggest slot machine, there WILL BE fraud. Fraud by the companies, hospitals, politicians and everyday people. I don't think it unreasonable to question or at least a little skeptical about some of the data being represented by the media and even their own gov't... after all, there's narratives to push, politicizing to do and fraud to be had. The media and ALL politicians have an equal history of not quite being honest with their viewers and their constituents.