Covid-19 Deaths Are Not Over Counted

Revisiting the myth that just won’t die

Dashboards used to be fun, now they’re mostly just depressing. Source: Pexels

There have been many sources of discussion during the Covid-19 pandemic. I’ve spent countless hours writing about everything from why baldness probably isn’t killing people to the endless debate over vitamin D and whether it does much for your coronavirus risk. However, there’s one thing that is very simply untrue, that has nevertheless formed a remarkable amount of the pandemic discourse for the last 2 years.

The idea is simple — Covid-19 death statistics are based on death reporting systems, which are themselves based on people who got a positive Covid-19 test and then died. If, however, these people were going to die anyway, from things other than Covid-19, they would not be dying OF Covid-19, but WITH Covid-19. If you look at only cases where the coronavirus is the sole listed ‘cause’ of death, the number is much smaller than the official count, and therefore most people are not actually dying of Covid-19!

Stock photo results for “shock” are, in a word, brilliant. Source: Pexels

The latest iteration of this idea is in the UK, where recent claims have surfaced that only about 1/10th of the deaths that have occurred in the country which are classified as Covid-19 deaths happened without any other underlying causes, and thus the ‘true’ death count is much lower. Specifically, the below idea, shared by a Youtuber and then numerous others, that only 17,000 people had died from Covid-19 in the UK. The claims went viral, as all such ridiculous myths do, because while it is objectively untrue it does make for a very nice soundbite.

The reality is quite simple, and far more depressing than the myths — almost everyone who has been reported as dying from Covid-19 died due to the virus itself. We know this as a fact.

Death Reporting

Almost all of these claims are based on the same very basic mistake in death…