The new study provides the most compelling data yet to suggest that excess mortality rates from chronic illnesses and other natural causes were actually driven by COVID-19 infections.

For the study, Stokes, Paglino, and colleagues utilized novel statistical methods to analyze monthly data on natural-cause deaths and reported COVID-19 deaths for 3,127 counties over the first 30 months of the pandemic, from March 2020 to August 2022. They estimated that 1.2 million excess natural-cause deaths occurred in US counties during this time period, and found that roughly 163,000 of these deaths did not have COVID-19 listed at all on the death certificates.

Now if we could get an estimate of how much chronic illness covid is causing...

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[–] FishLake@lemmygrad.ml 25 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

My mom was really proud that my grandma’s death certificate didn’t say COVID. The memory facility she was in did a pretty good job of locking down, but she did get pneumonia. You do the math. Alzhimeir’s was going to kill my grandma like it was planning to do for over a decade whether or not she contracted COVID. But still it’s a pretty strange cope my mom has about her death. I remember she was very concerned about COVID being listed as the cause of her mother’s death. I wonder how many people insist on striking COVID from a loved one’s death certificate.

[–] keepcarrot@hexbear.net 14 points 1 month ago (2 children)

That is very odd. Is covid any more or less embarrassing to die from than pneumonia or tripping on bed sheets?

[–] Ivysaur@hexbear.net 16 points 1 month ago (1 children)

it is when everyone says it’s at best not a problem or at worst not real and don’t really believe it

[–] FishLake@lemmygrad.ml 7 points 1 month ago

Maybe.

Maybe not for my mom. The relief she found with my grandma’s death certificate was/is, I believe, a trauma response to not being able to interact with her mother for the last few months of her life. My mom visited grandma in memory care facilities four or five times a week for many years. The last year was very difficult as my grandma’s mind atrophied more and more. She’d become violent during one visit and childlike during another. It was hard on mom. Then lockdown came and she couldn’t visit grandma.

Video calls with my mom were confusing and stressful for my grandma. Window visits too. Masked visits most of all. To my mom, lockdown seemed to hasten the dementia. And she probably wasn’t wrong. On the breadth 2021 grandma died. “Complications from pneumonia” or something like that on the death certificate. COVID took away my grandma from my mom. Not necessarily via infection, but certainly by the response to COVID in the first year of the pandemic. I think my mom wanted some solace. Or proof that even a pandemic could not keep her from seeing her mother. To wrestle some control back from the thing that took her mother away.

I’m sure there are many stories like this from early in the pandemic. Nowadays people cannot understand how someone can die of COVID without being ventilated in a crowded hospital like in the early days.

[–] InevitableSwing@hexbear.net 12 points 1 month ago

Irrational hatred of covid in particular really broke a lot of American brains.

pneumonia or tripping on bed sheets

Americans accept that people - especially old people - can die from those things. And they aren't connected to conspiracy theories and they aren't political either - as far as I know.

[–] Owl@hexbear.net 8 points 1 month ago

[–] StillNoLeftLeft@hexbear.net 5 points 1 month ago

Apparently not many remember this now, but there were big debates at least where I live amongst the covid minimizers (including experts) where they pushed for death certificates to not mention covid if it could in any way be concluded that the death wasn't only from covid or if covid wasn't "the leading cause of death" which of course is a debatable moving target. The think tank ghouls were involved if I remember right.

This means that someone who gets covid that results in pneumonia or a heart attack is officially counted as having not died from covid, because it wasn't "a covid death" per se.

[–] solrize@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

This is from February 2024 (i.e. it's a year old) and the undercount was significant but was not all that enormous. The study indicated that the official count was about 14% low.

[–] dolores_clitoris@hexbear.net 12 points 1 month ago

“This work is important because our ability to detect and correctly assign deaths during an epidemic goes to the heart of our understanding of the disease and how we organize our response,” says Nahid Bhadelia.

The undercount is pretty enormous, when you consider that the motive behind it is to avoid properly responding to epidemics/pandemics (now and in the future).