The number is never going to be perfect. I don’t think anyone claims otherwise. We don’t have exact numbers for any cause of death or any disease ever. For the Spanish Flu in 1918, all we know is that in the US, somewhere between 500,000 and 850,000 people died. That’s 350,000 dead Americans of uncertainty. Somehow for this, there’s an expectation that we’ll always know - to a person - exactly what happened in each and every single case. But coroners and medical examiners are still human beings. Some are lazy. Some are incompetent. Some are both.
The exact number will never be known, but we’ll have an approximate number and we’ll be able to use that for important things like trending that tells us if we’re going in a bad direction.
And yes, of course COVID-19 is being used for political purposes. It’s a thing that exists, so of course it’s being used and abused for politics, particularly when we look at the RESPONSE to it. And then there’s the blame game of who’s responsible for what deaths. I’ve played that game plenty myself, poking at Governor Cuomo for packing the nursing homes full of infected people causing a huge amount of deaths. Have Republican governors made some dumb moves that I could criticize? Probably, but if I’m being honest I’ll often gloss over all but the most egregious offenses on their part because of my political biases.
The point is that we can’t simply discount all the information around cases, deaths, and so on as though they’re all meaningless simply because the topic has political ramifications. What isn’t political is that Americans are dying. And more Americans are dying than should be. That deserves attention and frankly it deserves better leaders than we’re seeing in places like New York, New Jersey, and so on where the deaths per 1 million population are absolutely catastrophically bad.
Americans are dying, true. Having said that the lock down, masks and fear that people like you peddle is BS and not helping one bit. So with all due respect, stuff it pal.