Quote:
Originally Posted by Coop
Another situation - you have someone who is elderly, dying from some terminal illness. They catch covid, or have a false positive, but really die from their terminal illness. These situations would be labeled as a covid death.
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That’s a gross misinterpretation of how determining cause of death works, particularly the importance of underlying causes. When someone stops breathing because they have emphysema, their heart stops and they die. Primary cause is either respiratory failure or cardiac arrest, depending on how technical the coroner wants to be. Underlying cause is emphysema. You can make the same analogy using virtually all natural deaths. Just because emphysema wasn’t the primary cause doesn’t make it any less important.
In your example, if someone was dying of malignant cancer, and caught COVID, but was asymptomatic and it didn’t impact his health at all.. and he then died from cancer.. COVID would not be listed as a primary OR underlying cause of death. But, if he caught COVID and it did hasten or have a role in causing his death, it would be listed appropriately as a cause of the death.
It’s true that most of the time, COVID is listed as an underlying cause of death. But just because it’s listed as an underlying cause of death rather than the primary doesn’t mean it wasn’t caused by COVID. That’s the way the disease works. It’s analogous to how HIV/AIDS and myriad other diseases work. They’re no less dangerous because they are a domino in the middle or at the end. What’s important is that it was part of the cause.
Making the blanket statement you did shows an extreme misunderstanding of the diagnosis process... and of how illnesses, particularly COVID, work to kill someone.
(Unless you’re trying to say that medical professionals are committing fraud on a global scale and adding COVID as a cause of death when it wasn’t. That’s a whole different issue.)