Firstly I would say thanks for this post @krnel as it is nice and not hard to read. Said so I do mostly agree with what you said but I disagree with the number stated by Walter Ricciardi and the overestimation while the actual count should be only the 12%.
What we should consider is that it is true that in Italy we have the second highest elder population and clearly once you reach an age over than 70 or 80 (very common in Italy) you might have other health conditions.
It might be true that 33k people have been declared dead due to COVID19 but instead only 4k have been dying for it but as you said before if you have other health's problem, COVID19 would be something on the top of it. So let's make an example...
Mr Mario Rossi (classic name used for examples in Italy) has the age of 85 and had other conditions such as diabetic or respiratory distress in general... he gets ALSO Covid19 and he sadly passes away... we have a chance that he might have reached the age of 89 or 90 with his historical problems... but due to Covid he passed away. What killed him wasn't Covid but one of his 2 historical problems but the having been reached by the SARS virus, changed his health condition and he passed away. Shall we declare his death due to the new infection or due to his historical problem? I would chose the SARS as because many countries are less estimating the impact COVID had and are not declaring the real deaths.
Just my opinion that I hope it does make sense to you.
Well if COVID didn't kill him, then it didn't. If COVID made the other illnesses stronger or what not, then that still killed him, not COVID. Some people don't even have COVID and die, yet that gets counted as a "COVID death". Thanks for the feedback.
thanks for coming back to me. Yes of course if people are dying for other reasons without having Covid positivity and their death will used to increase the counts of deaths done by Covid then it is wrong.
In my opinion if people are dying for other illnesses that started getting worse due to Covid then it has to be counted as co-factor and have a count.