alt Hacker NewsHe was making a pun on the common practice during COVID of attributing death in death to certificates to COVID whenever the patient presented a positive PCR test, no matter the real cause of death, the actual existence of COVID disease in clinical terms or the existence of more preeminent factors in the death.
This usually happened due mostly as a result of federal policy of paying out extra money for hospitals based on the number of covid patients, thus creating an incentive of diagnosing anyone with a positive PCR test as sick from covid, whether they presented actual clinical symptoms of the disease or not.
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my understanding/recollection is that it was necessary for surveillance to note when decedents had COVID; it was listed as a (contributing or underlying, not sure of the jargon) cause, and so depending on how you cut the data you could count it either way -- tally all deaths with COVID as deaths from COVID (bigger), or only those where COVID was the main cause (smaller).
That seems made up, do you have a credible source for that?