Dr. Jeremy Faust:
The concept to understand is called excess mortality.
And the idea is, not just are there COVID deaths, but are there more deaths of all causes combined than there should be? And throughout the pandemic, we have seen, for the most part, there have been — there's been constant excess mortality that goes way up when we have a wave and comes down after the wave.
And we have very, very rarely seen a time where there were more COVID deaths being counted than there were all excess deaths. If that were to happen, you would start to think, oh, there's something to that argument. But, for the most part, it hasn't happened. It's happened at times.
And, in terms of hospitalizations and other outcomes, again, it's very difficult. People don't agree when they look at medical charts. But, actually, when we do that kind of work, I think we do see that, if anything, we're probably undercounting COVID deaths that happen that don't look like COVID deaths, so someone who dies at home, but they never got a COVID test, or someone who died of a diabetic crisis or heart failure exacerbation, and it's chalked up to heart failure or diabetes.
But they never would have had that exacerbation had they not contracted coronavirus the week before. And so, as long as we have excess mortality and COVID deaths going hand in hand, step by step, it's pretty hard to make an epidemiological argument that would support the overcounting approach.
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