No. This is not a correct characterization and you will not be able to substantiate it.
You gave poor logic to justify a bad methodology and used incorrect statistics as justification. I showed the flaw in your logic and sourced my data for the correct statistics.
Yes, and my post explains in grisly detail why it is appropriate to use this approach.
Your post was rife with faulty assumptions and circular logic.
You used a 5% fatality rate metric for people over 60 as a substantial part of your justification, when only people over 80 actually have that fatality rate associated with the disease. Moreover, you wholly ignored that the 28 day metric was applied to all age groups, many of which have Covid fatality rates of .2% - a disparity of 25X rate. It's a poor justification for the methodology.
Again, i'll note, that these methodologies are included in determining the fatality rate in the first place. If you start with a methodology that overcounts deaths of a particular cause, you'll have a higher fatality rate for that cause, which is your is necessary to your justification in the first place. You presuppose the fatality rate as justification for counting deaths as Covid deaths which, in turn, increases the calculated fatality rate.
I agree that this is a complicated matter. However, consider what you are asking people to believe. You are asking them to believe that you know better than hundreds if not thousands of trained experts.
Possible, but a priori, quite unlikely.
Can you show us one expert who believes that the "28 day" rule was not the best that could have been done?
I haven't said that i know better than the experts, but i have said that the justification that you gave was spectacularly flawed, and demonstrated exactly that.
I haven't seen any "experts" who established their guidelines present their reasoning, so i have no basis to effectively judge their determination.
It is obvious, however, that with even a cursory review of the question, that the "experts" came up with different methodologies in different areas, so there doesn't appear to actually be a consensus in how to calculate deaths from Covid, and simply assuming that all methodologies are equally justified and supported by sound logic is an unsupported assumption. It would appear that "experts" are arguing with each other, as they can't agree on a method for calculation.
While this article is older, the fundamental discussion involving how statistics are collected is applicable. Here's what one expert had to say about how Covid deaths are counted:
But there are all sorts of challenges in comparing countries, such as how widely they test for Covid-19 and whether they count deaths from the virus in the same way.
Prof Sir David Spiegelhalter from Cambridge University has said trying to rank different countries to decide which is the worst in Europe is a "completely fatuous exercise".
...
First of all, there are differences in how countries record Covid-19 deaths.
France and Germany, for example, have been including deaths in care homes in the headline numbers they produce every day.
But the daily figures for England referred only to deaths in hospitals until 29 April, when they started factoring in deaths in care homes as well.
A further complication is that there is no accepted international standard for how you measure deaths, or their causes.
Does somebody need to have been tested for coronavirus to count towards the statistics, or are the suspicions of a doctor enough?
Germany counts deaths in care homes only if people have tested positive for the virus. Belgium, on the other hand, includes any death in which a doctor suspects coronavirus was involved.
Coronavirus: Why are international comparisons difficult? - BBC News
You consistently like to defer to the experts without even looking at their underlying basis, as if policy makers, simply by being in their position, are infallible and shouldn't be question. That's not how science works.
I'm not asking people to "believe" anything. I'm asking them to review the information available and make an assessment as to if what you're being presented is reasonable, rather than deferring to policy makers as experts beyond questioning.
You're the one asking them to believe that every different method of counting Covid deaths is reasonable and justified based on the sole fact that "experts" came up with each of those methods.
