re: Terrible loss-An ER Nurse in Lafayette died of Covid

quote:

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The cause of death is never covid. It is cardiac arrest or respiratory failure with covid being on line 2

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Cardiac arrest and respiratory failure should never be on a death certificate. They are not causes of deaths, but mechanisms. If by line 2 you mean line B, then that is what gets counted by statistics because it’s the last line used in part 1. If you mean part 2, then covid would not be recorded.

If you put multiple things on one line such as:

A. Diabetes mellitus and hypertension

They count the first one.

If you put:

A. Diabetes mellitus

B. Hypertension

Then they count hypertension. However, this makes no sense as you are supposed to be able to use the words “due to” between lines. So that death certificate would read “diabetes mellitus due to hypertension.”

In this scenario the physician should pick one and put the other one in part two. So it should read something like

A. Hypertensive cardiovascular disease

Part 2: Diabetes mellitus


For typical covid pneumia deaths, the death certificate should read something like this:

A. CoVID-19 SARS-CoV-2 Pneumonia

Part 2: Diabetes Mellitus