County health officials reviewed COVID-19 death records and found 411 cases that were “clearly not” caused by the disease.
Source: Alameda County’s new COVID death toll is 25% lower than thought
Next they will tells us that 40+/-% of children hospitalized with Covid were actually hospitalized for other reasons and were only found to have Covid because all hospital patients are tested. Oh wait, they’ve actually discovered this is true …
It is to be expected that values will change over time. In my state, people who died of Covid-19 were periodically found not to have died at all, some who died of Covid-19 were later found to have died of other causes, and some who died of other causes were later concluded to have died of Covid-19. This happens and is normal. In the Alameda County situation, they were using a definition different than that required by the State of California, resulting in a large number of classification errors.
Perhaps instead of reporting precise daily body counts, they should be reported with a confidence interval.
