Dying "with" vs. Dying "from" Covid, pt. 1

You can still find people claiming, nowadays, that the official death toll from Covid is an overstatement of the actual deaths caused by Covid.  The rules for reporting deaths as "from" Covid, they say, are far too broad, and many people who are dying of other causes but simply happen to have Covid as well are being counted in Covid's official death toll.

There have been several serious flaws in this argument from the beginning, in my opinion.  First, proponents of this theory have frequently misread official guidelines for diagnosis or misapplied guidelines made at one level of government to local hospitals.  It's been a confusing set of changing guidelines, and unfortunately the tendency has been to jump on any rule change or guideline that supports this theory and publicize it widely, while ignoring rules or guidelines that don't.

Second, and more importantly, proponents of this theory have typically overemphasized the rules and down-played the common sense that actual humans writing death certificates bring to the table.  In my experience, there is quite a lot of interpretation according to common sense when it comes to the medical field.  Neither doctors nor nurses typically spend a lot of time robotically applying the exact written rules without regard for what they think is likely the right thing to do.  So I think it likely that common sense and good judgment is going to eliminate a lot of obviously wrong diagnosis.

Note that I am consistent in applying this principle.  At some point, the official rules for reporting adverse effects of a vaccination were updated to include guidelines specifically for Covid, and these rules are ridiculously strict--you are supposed to report any serious side effect after a Covid vaccination, whether you think it is linked to the vaccination or not ("regardless of causality", see text here: Reporting Adverse Events Following Vaccination).  This is explicitly different from the normal vaccination side effect reporting rules.  And yet I've never assumed that this rule has been followed completely, which--if it were--would imply that 100% of adverse side effects from the vaccines were being reported.  I believe the percentage is pretty high--but I also believe that despite the official rules, you will still get a lot of doctors applying common sense and saying, "no, I don't think that adverse effect is related" and not reporting something.  This, in my experience, is how the medical field operates most of the time.

However, I admit that these reasons are not super convincing.  Basically, how well you trust the numbers boils down to how much you trust the average hospital reporter to apply common sense.  And it's reasonable to have greater or less trust in these people, depending on your experiences and knowledge of the field.

So the question is, do we have any better, objective way of determining how often people's deaths are attributed to Covid purely because of coincidence?  And at this late stage in the pandemic, we do.  We now have a lot of data to work with and we can do some "forensic analysis" to get an idea of how often this happens.  We probably can't get a precise percentage, but we will be able to put some bounds of plausibility.

In Part 2 and Part 3, I will demonstrate two different ways of quantifying how often this kind of coincidental death occurs.