Statistics

Rona will be added as a contributory factor as a means for registering the pandemic.
Fear and panic is another factor that kills too when anyone has to be hospitalised. When anyone has to be attached to a respiratory machine it's a shock to the system.
There are dozens of people out there with undiagnosed heart problems who'll also fare badly regardless of age.

A young heart physician died last week, suddenly from a cardiac arrest. At 39 he had no signs/symptoms that anything was amiss. So when you see " was young, fit and strong " it doesn't always mean a thing. Especially where there are no underlying health problems.

Teens/ early 20's are now suffering the pandemic.

Just a thought. Are there any figures indicating whether women wearing burkas have contracted the Corona virus?

Covid19 is a deadly disease which can attack every organ of the body.

If a person already suffering from heart disease or cancer conracts covid19, the may survive or they may not, but their chance of dying is much higher than it would have been otherwise and so even if the death certificate says that the cause of death was cancer or heart disease and they were previously diagnosed with covid19, it is very likely that that was a contributary cause and that death ought to be included in the statistics.

The authorities here in Australia make a similar diagnosis. If someone has COVID19 and dies from a heart attack they are counted as a virus death even though it was not the virus that killed them.

IMO there is a vast difference between dying FROM corona virus and dying WITH corona virus and it is the latter only that should be counted as a virus death.

I wouldn't presume to call any opinion from the bona fide scientific community guff. I'd rather keep an open mind and consider a diversity of views. Comments such as spreading guff are justified when someone copies and pastes advice put out by a random on the internet who has the white coat but no qualifications. Those are dangerous, and there were plenty seen even on Gransnet in the early days of lockdown.

The figures Franbern quotes are interesting. I'd also like to see the stats on the people varian mentions, the ones excluded who have died of covid19 more than 28 days after diagnosis.

Harsh response growstuff but you have a point I know but the 'before you spread this guff' comment was uncalled for and hardly a reasonsed debate.
I enjoyed franberns post. This situation is many faceted, so commented on, so researched that we may never get the true picture and certainly not until much later. Let people have their say before you land like a ton of bricks on them its unkind.

Aha! You mean the Oxford Uni "Covid denying" team of Heneghan and Gupta?

The same Gupta who said that young people have a duty to infect themselves to achieve herd immunity, even though herd immunity has never been achieved without a vaccine. No matter that thousands of people would die and/or suffer debilitating after effects in the attempt to achieve the mythical herd immunity.

Death certificates have never been very precise. By the time a person dies after testing positive for Covid, he/she no longer has viral load. However, the virus will have attacked various organs, including the lungs, kidneys or heart, so the person would die from organ failure, which is what would be stated on the death certificate.

Before you spread guff from these people, please check out what other scientists and medics say, so that you at least give a balanced view.

Why should they exclude all those who have died of covid19 more than 28 days after diagnosis?