I wonder as the statistics are compiled we will ever know how many people died because of the coronavirus versus how many people died with the coronavirus?
I don't think we'll ever really know.
They tend to lump up everyone in the "died, but had a pre-existing condition" into one column regardless if the pre-existing conditions were pretty ordinary things for Americans like diabetes. Or maybe I'm interpreting it wrong.
There are also people who are impossible to categorize.
Like my mom is closing in on 80 years old with a whole host of conditions. Everything from multi-time cancer survivor to MS suffer. Anytime I take her out to dinner its one medicine after another. One of my friends was "that's a whole lot of vitamins", and she said that because she couldn't fathom anyone being on that many medications.
A few years ago my mom was basically on her death bed. It was so bad I flew out my sister and her family out to see mom one last time. But, she didn't die. That time was the result of a bad reaction to medication designed to kill stuff growing in her lungs. So they opted to simply leave it alone. She also needs some surgeries, but they're too dangerous to do on her.
I'd classify her in that in-between area between when you're alive and you're dead. You can't do a whole lot, but modern science with multiple doctor visits a month keeps you going. All my mom does with her life is watch the news, and eat chocolate. Occasionally when my brother is nice he'll bring over his kids to see her, and that's basically what she lives for.
I don't think society really knows what to do with people like this. We know that they're costing us billions in health care cost without a lot of return (in years left). But, we can't really do much about it because it's in our nature to keep people going. We still have a large percentage of people who believe in the whole after life fantasy so the whole god things plays heavily with them.
We don't like the whole assisted suicide thing. We don't like it when people play god, and choose to live on their own accord.
Where I'm some weirdo on the side that lives on his own accord, and will leave when I damn well please. To me you're either alive and functional or dead. There is no in-between for me. Well except for momentary times where I'm healing from whatever my latest oops moment was. My death is either going to be seriously tragic accident like falling off a longboard doing 50mph or suicide with multiple redundancies (many decades from now).
There are very few of me in this world, and a great many of my mom. People just too stubborn to die, and the coronavirus is wrecks havoc with them. So I dunno how we should classify their death. It's hard to use the "did the doctor give them 6 months to live" classification because my moms doctor told her that 20 years ago.
So I'm going to classify EVERY coronavirus death as a coronavirus death regardless of preexisting conditions. But, I know the numbers are undercounted. To work around this I'm going to use total deaths, and then correct that by adding back in deaths that would have happened had the shutdown not happened. We generally have good numbers for fatal accidents, etc. So we should be able to compile a pretty close estimate of Coranavirus related deaths.
