How a country defines a Covid-19 death correlates well with how bad their death rate is

Tam Hunt
2 min readAug 28, 2020

Countries that take very inclusive approaches to defining Covid-19 deaths unsurprisingly top the charts of death rates from the pandemic

The pandemic’s top 13 death rate countries are as follows, from statista.com:

How is a Covid-19 death defined in each country? Unsurprisingly, we see that each country that is included in this top 13 list, and has non-negligible infection and mortality numbers, simply defines a Covid-19 very inclusively as any death related to Covid-19, with some not even requiring a positive test. None of these countries require any affirmative statement of attribution of death due to the virus, rather than a comorbidity (preexisting condition) here’s how Each nation defines a Covid-19 death:

  • Yemen: very low infection and mortality numbers
  • Italy: defined as any death that tested positive for cov2 virus with a PCR test, at any point in time
  • UK: any positive test and later death at any later time and anywhere, after April 29, but this was later re-defined to include only deaths taking place no more than 28 days after a positive test, resulting in a significant reduction in the Covid-19 death tally in August
  • Belgium: any death suspected or tested positive (basically same ultra inclusive as US; “more than half of those deaths have been in nursing homes” and ONLY 4.5% OF THOSE deaths were actually tested)
  • Hungary: couldn’t find the definition and overall cases and deaths are extremely low anyway
  • Mexico: can’t find
  • France: any death “linked” to Covid-19, and only deaths in hospitals counted until an April 4 definition change
  • Netherlands: must have tested positive and died in a hospital
  • Chad: negligible
  • Canada: follows WHO guidelines defining any positive test and then later death as a Covid-19 death
  • Sweden: any death anywhere testing positive at any time for Covid-19 is counted as a Covid death
  • Spain: any patient who tested positive and later died anywhere
  • Liberia: negligible

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Tam Hunt

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