GRAND COUNTY, Colo. (CBS4) – The Grand County coroner is calling attention to the way the state health department is classifying some deaths. The coroner, Brenda Bock, says two of their five deaths related to COVID-19 were people who died of gunshot wounds.
Bock says because they tested positive for COVID-19 within the past 30 days, they were classified as “deaths among cases.”
There is nothing wrong with "deaths among cases" qualifications. Those are not the deaths that go into the official death numbers.
ReplyDeleteAs it turns out, I have a friend who is an MD at a major Denver hospital, and who has been treating COVID19 patients since the start, and filling out death certificates. He has gone into substantial detail about how that is done.
Basically, if an MD determines that COVID19 was the primary cause of death, that becomes a COVID19 death. A COVID19 diagnosis does not result in the death being counted as a COVID death. But a death certificate lists both the primary cause, and all contributing causes and conditions.
The CDC had a very misleading article about this on one of their sites, which could have been read as meaning that, for example, a death from cardiac arrest would be coded as COVID19. But what it really showed was that if someone died of COVID19, they may have had "cardiac arrest" as one of the conditions they had at the time of death. That's hardly surprising since cardiac arrest happens with all deaths.