The Corona Perspective Some of You Seem to lack

[hobart]

Statistics doesn't care about your politics, Trumptards. It doesn't know where the US embassy in Benghazi is. It doesn't know anything about Burisma.

Yes, COVID case outcomes are tracked (disease surveillance) -- this person had COVID, did they live or die? This is where you see initial and projected death counts from. This is how hospitals and other medical systems earn some of their COVID funding.

But, in every state there is a system in place with CDC guidelines to reconcile death certificates and coroner's reports with disease surveillance data. Some states are better at it than others. That said, the states that are bad at this practice are the same states that have issues with testing and availability which means they are the same states that have more people dying of COVID without ever getting tested.

The CDC reports show <5% difference between surveillance data and reconciled data. Factoring in unreported cases, they generally assume this is a statistical wash.