{"id":360154,"date":"2026-07-31T12:55:52","date_gmt":"2026-07-31T12:55:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/uncategorized\/find-out-who-is-counting-the-dead-and-why-that-matters\/"},"modified":"2026-07-31T12:55:52","modified_gmt":"2026-07-31T12:55:52","slug":"find-out-who-is-counting-the-dead-and-why-that-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=360154","title":{"rendered":"Find out who is counting the dead \u2014 and why that matters"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Before COVID-19, many people seemed to have believed that every death in the United States \u2014 indeed\u00a0in the world \u2014 was accurately registered in some universally accessible system that would serve as an\u00a0eternal record of who died from what and when.<\/p>\n

Perhaps one of the silver linings of the pandemic has been that it has exposed that notion as fantasy.\u00a0People in public health rely on a basic assumption: Trends in health are estimates. How many people are\u00a0contracting a disease. How many people survive a disease. How many people die from a disease. These\u00a0are all estimates.<\/p>\n

And the reason they are estimates is that the underlying data \u2014 even data pulled directly from death\u00a0certificates \u2014 are prone to be wrong enough that they can\u2019t be taken by themselves as a true picture of\u00a0what is actually going on with health. Even a set of pictures \u2014 X-rays, MRIs, and bacteria cultures \u2014 can\u00a0be prone to error and misinterpretation.<\/p>\n

When I first went to work for the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of\u00a0Washington, I was blown away by how many problems there are in underlying health data. There has\u00a0been some breathless reporting this year expressing the same kind of surprise I had when I first saw the\u00a0gaps and mistakes in health data. One NBC story said \u201cOfficial coronavirus death tolls are only an\u00a0estimate, and that is a problem<\/a>.\u201d I wanted to take that headline and insert \u201ccolon cancer,\u201d \u201ccar crash,\u201d\u00a0and \u201csuicide\u201d into the same sentence. Death counts are all estimates.<\/p>\n

The good news is that among all the problematic sources of health information, death certificates\u00a0remain the most reliable source of information about fatal diseases like COVID-19. During this politicized pandemic, pundits and politicians are focusing on the problems with death\u00a0counts and health information as if they were specific to COVID-19.<\/p>\n

They\u2019re not.<\/p>\n

In Florida, supporters of Gov. Rick DeSantis have been trying for months to say that the state\u2019s death\u00a0data are unreliable and that they are likely capturing deaths from other causes. Critics of the governor\u00a0have been saying the opposite, that the death counts are likely lower than what is really happening\u00a0because some COVID-19 deaths are never reported.<\/p>\n

Public health experts know both of these arguments well. It\u2019s why they have spent decades working on\u00a0ways to overcome such data limitations. Public health officials and organizations like IHME address the\u00a0problems in death counting by looking at overall trends over large swaths of the population and over\u00a0long periods of time. By doing this, you can detect patterns over time that tell you whether one part of\u00a0the country \u2014 or the world \u2014 is simply overcounting or undercounting. You can also see when there\u00a0appears to be a genuine spike. It\u2019s how, for example, researchers discovered that painkiller overdose\u00a0deaths in the United States were being counted as true overdoses in some places and more \u201cunspecified\u00a0accidental poisonings<\/a>\u201d in other places.<\/p>\n

Part of understanding those trends is figuring out whether deaths are being counted generally in the\u00a0same way consistently over a period of time.<\/p>\n

Reporter Cindy Krischer Goodman works in what may be ground zero for this battle over COVID-19\u00a0death data. She\u2019s a health reporter for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, which covers Palm Beach County,\u00a0where President Donald Trump recently voted. She showed how simply asking the question of who is\u00a0counting deaths can help audiences understand whether the deaths may be overcounted or\u00a0undercounted.<\/p>\n

Who is counting?<\/p>\n

Contrary to what many people believe, each death is not verified by a medical examiner. Most people\u2019s\u00a0bodies are not rolled out from a set of freezers in a room with cold, neon lighting like we see in crime\u00a0shows, and then tested and prodded for clues. When someone dies, it can be a wide variety of people\u00a0involved in determining what killed them, including: one of the physicians involved in their treatment, a\u00a0different physician who read through their chart, an entirely different medical professional just trying to\u00a0work through a paperwork backlog, a medical examiner, a nurse practitioner, a forensic pathologist, a\u00a0coroner, even a judge in some states.<\/p>\n

To find out who is counting in your area, try contacting your local health department or your state\u00a0health department.<\/p>\n

Each of those people might interpret the facts that they have about a death in different ways. What has\u00a0their past experience told them? What are the typical practices of their peers? How might a physician\u00a0who has treated the same patient for a week, knows all of their test results, and has followed closely all\u00a0of their signs and symptoms code a particular death versus a judge who had a one-minute conversation\u00a0with a family member after someone died at home?<\/p>\n

Which brings us to another problem.<\/p>\n

In some states, the way in which COVID-19 deaths are being counted has changed midway through the\u00a0pandemic. Goodman wrote<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Florida in August changed its rules for determining whether someone died of COVID-19, moving that\u00a0responsibility from public medical examiners to the doctors who treated the patients. The change was\u00a0meant to relieve medical examiners who were swamped with COVID deaths, but it also created\u00a0inconsistencies in how COVID deaths are documented and raised new questions about the accuracy and\u00a0timeliness of the state\u2019s COVID-19 death counts.<\/em><\/p>\n

How deaths are reporting in your county or state has a ripple effect nationally, too. A subset of deaths\u00a0\u2014 usually those from infectious diseases like COVID-19 \u2014 are required to be reported by medical\u00a0professionals to local health departments and, in some cases, to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control\u00a0and Prevention. So, in addition to a death certificate, the record of that death may end up in some\u00a0regular reporting system about infectious diseases.<\/p>\n

What you can do for your audiences is walk them through how your local health authorities are counting\u00a0deaths, whether that has changed, and whether there appears to be any opportunities or motives for\u00a0political influence along the way. Source after source in Goodman\u2019s story, with the exception of the\u00a0governor\u2019s pitch men, build the case that the problems with death reporting in Florida are more likely to\u00a0result in fewer deaths being counted. Not more. The opposite might be true elsewhere. She presents a\u00a0convincing case, and you can do the same for your audiences.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Before COVID-19, many people seemed to have believed that every death in the United States \u2014 indeed\u00a0in the world \u2014 was accurately registered in some universally accessible system that would serve as an\u00a0eternal record of who died from what and when. Perhaps one of the silver linings of the pandemic has been that it has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":360155,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[10045,4580,10959,7633],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-360154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-counting","tag-dead","tag-find","tag-matters"],"yoast_head":"\nFind out who is counting the dead \u2014 and why that matters - Som2ny Network<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=360154\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Find out who is counting the dead \u2014 and why that matters - Som2ny Network\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Before COVID-19, many people seemed to have believed that every death in the United States \u2014 indeed\u00a0in the world \u2014 was accurately registered in some universally accessible system that would serve as an\u00a0eternal record of who died from what and when. 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