Professor Walter Ricciardi, scientific adviser to Italy’s minister of health estimated that registering those who died with rather than of covid inflated their figures 8-fold. He said:
“The way in which we code deaths in our country is very generous in the sense that all the people who die in hospitals with the coronavirus are deemed to be dying of the coronavirus […] On re-evaluation by the National Institute of Health, only 12 per cent of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus, while 88 per cent of patients who have died have at least one pre-morbidity – many had two or three,””
Moreover, substituting one questionable statistic for another isn’t addressing the problem. Excess death rates include those who died because of lockdown restrictions rather than covid – lack of access to routine medical care or emergency services, suicides, domestic violence, etc … How many? Nobody knows or is making any effort to find out. Why not?
Look, we can bandy about our favourite quotes till the cows come home but it is indisputable that different countries use different criteria to register covid-deaths, yet this factor is ignored when comparing how nations have fared. Like infection-mortality rates and excess death rates, national comparisons are obfuscated. What’s going on?