BBC: Died with or Died of COVID? What is happening with Mortality Statistics

What's really going on with Covid deaths data?

With this headline, the British public media BBC published an analysis proving that with Omicron, deaths from COVID in the UK are rising sharply, but more and more of them are actually due to something else.

"This is because some people die with Covid, not from it," the author said.

The analysis of the British media raises again the question of whether a distinction is made between "died of coronavirus" and "died with coronavirus" and to what extent this difference is reflected in the statistics we read daily.

The wave of Omicron leads to an increase in infections, which means that more people will become infected and some will get sick. Deaths are inevitable, too, but not all will be "real" COVID deaths. There will be people who simply gave a positive test, the analysis says.

There are several ways to track the number of COVID-19-related deaths. The most significant of these is the daily reporting of all deaths within 28 days of a positive test. For the vast majority of these people, COVID was the root cause of their deaths. However, there has always been a smaller part where the cause of death is different. And because Omicron infects so many people, people are more likely to die from an unrelated cause in the month after the test than in the past, writes the BBC.

Doctors who record the deaths write on what may have contributed to them and what most likely caused them. If COVID has contributed in any way, it is a "Covid-related" death. For most of the pandemic, the number of these deaths has closely followed the daily number of deaths, the author said. And they cite the following statistics: in the autumn...