But in general, the COVID deaths are the best indicator we have of the way the virus hit each country.
Just because something is the "best indicator" does not mean it is sufficiently accurate to be a valid basis for cross-national comparisons. Your best indicator can still suck.
Also, the whole COVID-for-profit conspiracy that it's a prevalent, rampant problem tends to fall apart when you look into it.
Let me be clear -- I have never believed for a second in any "conspiracy". It is not fake, it is a real disease that has killed/hurt a lot of people. But there are shitloads of other things disease, activities, etc., that do the same. The question is whether the
magnitude of this particular disease is sufficient to justify the reaction. Because the reaction is not without very real costs of its own. Not just in terms of health/life itself, but in terms of
quality and enjoyment of life, which is something that has been massively under-discussed. And how individual people choose to balance that is not something for which there is an objectively "right" or "wrong" answer.
Now, some people who do believe there is an objectively right or wrong answer to that may, in good faith, slant or steer facts, recommendations, etc., in their direction so as to lead people to believe that their approach is the wisest/best. That doesn't take a
conspiracy, though. It's just a normal way that people behave when attempting to convince others. And because so many doctors are risk averse in health matters...they naturally lean in that direction.
I have to imagine this conspiracy theory originated from only one place--that Medicare insurance reimburses hospitals more for a COVID patient than they do for a simpler respiratory illness, like pneumonia, the cold, or the flu. Is this accurate?
If you're talking about the specific issue of some deaths being wrongly attributed to Covid because of reimbursement, there are a bunch of sources for that. One of whom is the director of the CDC himself who testified to that, and noted that they've seen that phenomenon before with other diseases:
There is monetary incentive for hospitals to report deaths as COVID-19 (C-19) even when the actual cause is not C-19. This type of inaccurate number reporting has also happened in the past with HIV/AIDs per CDC director.
www.c-span.org
That doesn't mean that
all the numbers are fake -- it just means that there is
some degree of inflation which makes it more difficult to simply compare raw numbers cross-nationally. The exact magnitude of that is inherently unknowable. If you say that absolutely is
not happening, well, people are free to decide whether to believe you, or believe the head of the CDC.
I think we're getting a bit off the NFL theme here....
This all goes to the same point --
should the NFL season (or any other sports season) be shut down if there is a Covid outbreak, or should that simply be considered -- to put it bluntly -- just something we (and not just NFL players) have to work/play through?
I'm not at all sure there is a single right answer to that, because people, including individual players, may balance risk v. quality of life differently, and therefore may make different decisions.