Do you think the stats are exaggerated at all? Honest question and I’m not looking for a fight.
My 75 year old uncle had terminal liver cancer. He had stopped all treatment and was in hospice. He caught Covid (presumably from his wife who’s a nurse back in the early days of the pandemic). The counted his cause of death as Covid.
My great uncle, 94, was in a nursing home. He was in renal failure and refusing dialysis. He also caught Covid and died with many other from the same facility. They called his cause of death Covid too.
Both very sad events. My father, who loved both men very much, talks about them dying of Covid all the time. I will remind him sometimes that they were both terminal already, that Covid was just the final straw. Yup it sucks.
I just wonder how many of the 500,000 deaths so far are like this. 10%? 20%?
What’s your opinion? And thank you very much for your medical service. We have many nurses in the family and they are getting slammed, especially my pals in the ICUs.
certainly there are some that were dying anyway for whom covid happened to be the terminal event. This seems to be a relatively small number but no way to absolutely know how many. The other problem is where to draw the line? a life expectancy if 2 weeks or less? a month or less? it becomes very difficult to sort out. I will say the vast majority of patients I have cared for do not fall into this category. I am sorry for your losses made more difficult i am sure by the isolation and distancing rules.