I can't believe that people are quick to tell me that the pneumonia I had in January couldn't possibly have been COVID-19, but they say that every death since January is COVID caused.
> but they say that every death since January is COVID caused.
I have no idea where you came up with this nonsense, but if anything there are academic studies demonstrating that, even in countries that do a honest job reporting covid19 deaths, Covid19 deaths have been systematically underreported.
Who, exactly, says every death since January is caused by COVID-19? I cannot find any statistics which suggest that about 20 million people have died to coronavirus this year.
You may be confusing this with excess deaths count, which is tracking the difference between deaths in a given month of 2020 and deaths in the same month in previous year (or years, averaged). Assuming no other unknown disease or phenomenon other than COVID-19 is silently ravaging our societies, this is the most reliable metric we have - as government after government has been caught on underreporting COVID-19 deaths.
But that's clearly a false assumption. It assumes hospitals can be emptied and society put under house arrest with no excess deaths as a consequence, which is not only a very strange assumption but contradicted by huge amounts of evidence.
There's by now a whole lot of people, including many experts in many domains, who are concluding the lockdown will kill more people than the disease itself. Far more if it turns out they had little impact, which there is also quite some evidence of.
You can filter out deaths by suicide and similar, of which there isn't many so far (but yes, maybe the lockdown will kill more; it hasn't now). You kind of already have to filter out things like deaths by traffic accidents, of which there's much less now.
And consider that heart attack and stroke centers are seeing precipitous drops in patient referrals, almost certainly meaning that the fear of catching COVID-19 is causing many people to avoid treatment and die at home: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/patients-with-heart-at...
