So roughly, 6% of 200,000 = 12,000 direct covid deaths? Out of 32,000,000 confirmed cases. So a .0375 mortality percentage.
Assuming rough numbers, do I have that right?
Nope. Because you’re misunderstanding what that “6%” actually is. If you used that same standard with cancer patients, we would have almost no cancer deaths in the US. Because nobody dies directly from cancer. Cancer leads to multiple organ failure and they die of heart failure or lung failure or something similar. Or they get pneumonia and die from that.
The CDC has two designations for causes of death: the immediate cause of death (e.g. person’s heart stops beating) and the underlying cause of death (e.g. cancer). The underlying cause of death is the disease or injury which initiated the chain of events leading directly to death. In the case of COVID-19, what more commonly happens is the person gets COVID-19, it basically sandblasts the protective lining of the lungs, an opportunistic infection (such as pneumonia) moves in once the protecting lining is gone, and the combination of multiple infections on an already weakened body results in death.
What the CDC said was that on 6% of death certificates, the person filling out the certificate didn’t bother listing anything except COVID-19. That number should probably be 0%. But COVID-19 was still the underlying cause of death for those cases. Those 200,000+ people would still be alive today (almost to a person) were it not for COVID-19. We know this based on the excess mortality numbers. The US has exceeded the threshold for excess mortality every single week since March.