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Hospitals are not the arbiters of what gets marked as a COVID-related death. The local health agencies make that determination using information provided by the hospitals for each fatality.

Thus for example, if you test postive for COVID19, but die from massive blood loss from the car accident that brought you to the hospital in the first place, you are recorded as dying from blood loss, not COVID19. If you have stage 4 cancer and a few weeks to live, and also have COVID19, and you die in a few weeks, you are recorded as dying from cancer, not COVID19.



True, but there is still a judgement call.

If someone has terminal cancer and is told they have a month to live, but contract Covid and only last 3 weeks, what do you put down? Was it the Covid that killed them?


Google "comorbidities" + "[insert any disease]" and you'll find this same topic discussed over and over.

This is something the medical profession has been dealing with pretty much forever. There is no reason to believe that suddenly there is a conspiracy to change how they handle reporting.


I'm not claiming a conspiracy theory, just that determining the cause of death is not always black and white.

That said, hospitals get a bigger payment if the patient has COVID, so they have a very strong incentive to diagnose it.


If they die of COVID symptoms, then yes.

It gets mucky if they have lung cancer, but I think it's such a tiny fraction of cases that have terminal lung cancer which will kill them in very few weeks _and_ the severe case of COVID-19.


"If they die of COVID symptoms, then yes."

What does that mean? Respiratory failure? Plenty of diseases cause death through respiratory failure.

It's not that straight forward to determine cause of death in patients with comorbidities.


If you contract COVID-19 and then you die of Pneumonia a few weeks later then it's a pretty good guess.




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