Thanks for your response. I wondered if your earlier statement about postive tests exceeding population was a typo. It appears that you meant total tests exceeding population, which has, in fact, happened. Beyond that you raise some very good questions. Regarding how multiple positives are reported, it's my understanding that health departments draw a distinction between positive tests (can be multiple per person) and cases (only once). They can do that because, at the local level where they can perform contact tracing, data is kept per person. Once the data is reported to the CDC, it is not longer personally identifiable, so the data is reported as total positives (out of total test count) and new cases. If anyone has heard otherwise I'd like to hear it. It does appear that there is a lot of confusion on how the data is collected and the degree of uniformity.
As for cause of death, isn't it common to report immediate and co-morbidities on death certificates? You would obviously know more than I but I understood it was common when they throw out statements like "the flu causes 30K - 60K deaths per year" that is the number of cases where flu was cited as a cause on the death certificate but there are often co-morbidities there as well. Since doctors are generally not able to see the future, much less hypotheticals in the future, they can observe that that an active disease may combine with a pre-existing condition leading to death but in most cases they lack the ability to reliably forecast when that condition might have led to death on its own. As you noted a better macro measure may be to just measure mortality rates or the number of "excess deaths" during the pandemic. When the pandemic started we saw reports that claimed excess deaths were much greater than the SARS-CoV-2 death totals, but now we see reports (including the JHU report that was withdrawn but is all over the Internet) claiming the opposite, that there are relatively few or no excess deaths. I guess we'll have to wait and see once this is over and thorough, hopefully less politically charged analyses can be done.
As for hockey, I too am excited about some of our new recruits. Smith may have some tough decisions to make in the coming years as he juggles a pretty full roster that just gained another year of eligibility with a constant need for new blood.
