Notes From A Reader -- Covid-19 -- July 26, 2020

For lack of a better place to post this, I will post this e-mail note I received from a reader here.

From a reader:

I learned on Twitter that there's a database of COVID-19 deaths that the Florida Medical Examiners Commission maintains. The media got the agency to release its descriptive narratives of the deaths. Florida Today has the database, at https://www.floridatoday.com/story/news/2020/07/11/update-searchable-florida-medical-examiners-database/5415936002/.

I've been going through the database. It is eye-opening to read the array of health problems that most of the decedents had. This is from the start of the narrative for a man who died on April 18:

“The decedent was a 74 year old white male with a complex medical history that included chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) with oxygen dependency, congestive heart failure (CHF), atrial fibrillation, coronary artery disease, scleroderma with pulmonary involvement treated with corticosteroids, type 2 diabetes mellitus, and pulmonary hypertension. On 1/25/2020, the patient was admitted to Naples Community Hospital with complaints of generalized weakness, progressively worsening shortness of breath, and cough. He denied fever, chest pain, headache, and diarrhea. He was diagnosed with uncontrolled hyperglycemia, sepsis due to community acquired pneumonia, and COPD exacerbation. The decedent was discharged on 1/29/2020 to a skilled nursing facility, and later discharged home with his wife on 2/24/2020.”

This is an extreme case, and the extreme case noted in the tweet that linked to the database was ...

... a 35-year-old on a rooftop who got hit by lightning.

But, last night I read narratives for over an hour, and there was one instance of someone dying without a co-morbidity listed.

In many cases, a strong impression that the people were going to die within a couple months regardless of their coronavirus status. End-stage renal disease, stage 4 cancer, etc. Many of the sub-40-year-olds were morbidly obese and/or had another long-term serious problem, such as Down’s syndrome. You do not read of ordinary 27-year-olds, or 76-year-olds, who felt bad one morning, felt worse over the next couple days, went to the hospital, and died 10 days later.

I have read one case of an asymptomatic coronavirus carrier who had COVID-19 listed as a cause of death. Dozens of people who got both positive and negative coronavirus tests before dying.

It isn’t news that the coronavirus isn’t killing healthy people, but you get a deeper understanding of this by reading through case after case. It also makes you wonder about Mexico: how many fatalities would that country be reporting if it were testing and listing COVID-19 on death certificates with the intensity that the U.S. is?