[forcry]

>the largest excess mortality in our dataset was observed in the United States

This is not very surprising given the following practice..

> Q Can you talk about your concerns about deaths being misreported by coronavirus because of either testing or standards for how they’re characterized?

> DR. BIRX: So, I think, in this country, we’ve taken a very liberal approach to mortality, and I think the reporting here has been pretty straightforward over the last five to six weeks. Prior to that, when there wasn’t testing in January and February, that’s a very different situation and unknown. There are other countries that if you had a pre-existing condition and let’s say the virus caused you to go to the ICU and then have a heart or kidney problem — some countries are recording that as a heart issue or a kidney issue and not a COVID-19 death. Right now, we’re still recording it, and we’ll — I mean, the great thing about having forms that come in and a form that has the ability to mark it as COVID-19 infection — the intent is, right now, that those — if someone dies with COVID-19, we are counting that as a COVID-19 death.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210119100429/https://www.white...

[detaro]

Excess mortality is not at all influenced by how deaths are classified, that is the point of why people are looking at it... So that quote makes no sense as a reaction to the statement. If there were a policy of not recording any deaths as COVID-19, the excess mortality would be exactly the same!

[forcry]

True. Got confused.