a good laugh from this read. CNN, who btw never hit China for causing the covid, does a hit piece on Russia for not reporting ALL deaths as covid 19 deaths.
Why is Russia's Covid-19 mortality rate so low?
Opinion by Kent Sepkowitz
Updated 6:54 PM ET, Wed May 13, 2020
So, is Dr. Malinnikova correct? Is the difference really due to testing and the apparently efficient Russian health care system?
Perhaps, but there may be other ways to explain the differences. We do not know, for example, how Russia attributes death to Covid-19. If a person with heart disease dies with the infection, which condition is the "cause?" How quickly does information come to Moscow from the rural areas which may have higher death rates given the higher rate of comorbidities?
And what about nursing home deaths – are these being included as Covid-19 related, even if a test was not performed?
As in the US and elsewhere, accurate classification of a Covid-19-related death remains very important to our understanding of the disease and the effectiveness of our attempts to control it. However, certainty about how, exactly, a person died remains a very difficult determination.
Diseases are not independent of each other: someone with heart disease will predictably fare worse with pneumonia than someone without heart disease – but should the person die, what is the true cause of death? Probably a collision of illnesses that collectively overwhelm a person rather than a single nameable cause.
This means that the cause of death can be tilted one way or another while still remaining accurate. And with a disease such as Covid-19, where political tensions are evident in many countries, this latitude (and the temptation to exploit it) calls to mind the chilling statement popularly attributed to Josef Stalin, though it's far from clear that he said it: "It is not who votes but who counts the votes that matters."
In other words, the death rate from Covid-19 in Russia and worldwide is defined not by an internationally agreed upon definition, but by the authorities who are reporting. Once again, we may find our understanding of Covid-19 stymied by an altogether new uncertainty – this one not medical at all, but entirely the product of political calculations.