6 Percent

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I keep seeing people posting this statistic from the CDC that COVID-19 is the only cause of death mentioned for 6% of deaths attributed to it. In other words, people had some other disease or injury in addition to COVID.

The first post I saw about this, the person just captioned it like, "This is interesting..." I left a comment that I [legitimately] didn't know what they were getting at, because yes, it's true that COVID deaths in otherwise totally robust and healthy people are probably rare. But we've been told this whole time that having other health conditions puts people at a greater risk of complications from COVID, and unfortunately this impacts many people. I then suggested the poster look at the CDC's excess deaths data, instead, which would better illustrate the discrepancy around deaths where the cause hasn't been determined. Another commenter made a good comparison to AIDS - most people don't die directly from AIDS, but from pneumonia or some other illness that is exacerbated by the patient's immune deficiency. 

The original poster commented that the comorbidities they were seeing were unrelated things like poisoning and injuries, which they had determined by looking at the ICD-10 codes. These are the codes used to categorize the reason for your visit to or treatment by doctors. Another commenter explained that these codes stay with you for a year. So if someone had been treated for an injury in January, and then died of COVID in June, the code for the injury would still be listed with them. That doesn't mean they died from the injury instead of or in addition to COVID.

I had thought this theory came directly from the person who posted it, who had been poking around the CDC web site and thought they found an interesting discrepancy, but the next day I saw it shared by someone else, tagging groups of like-minded people, and someone in the comments there referred to it as a viral post or theory. So I think it must be going around in circles of people trying to prove that death rates are being overstated. (Edit: This statistic was apparently shared in a tweet by the president, which was later removed from Twitter, but not before enough people got wind of it that they decided to go to the CDC web site and see for themselves.) I've said before that people should be wary of the source when posting data and theories like this, but I guess another caveat should be that even if it comes from a reliable source like the CDC, you also have to understand the data you're looking at before jumping to conclusions or assuming there's some kind of conspiracy or coverup going on 🤷‍♀️