It could be Long Covid. The Covid that goes on for ever.
Seriously, people need to be aware that the Covid sceptics are trying to help them
If a patient did not have a previous cardiovascular or respiratory condition or if they did and that condition worsened due to COVID-19 to the point of death, especially if the patient was discharged from the hospital and came back, then that death is counted as COVID generated because it was the trigger. Yes, in spite of the time.
And here in Taiwan, they are keeping record of adverse reactions to vaccines and those are compensated. Unless they come from the LINE rumormill. Sigh.
You don’t know that, though. It’s complete speculation based on the low-quality and obfuscated data the government is releasing every day.
How would you account for it routinely taking up to 14 weeks for the government to report a COVID death? Do you not find that surprisingly long to determine a cause of death?
It’s difficult to believe that the reporting system is currently overwhelmed, for example, given that three people with at least most of their fingers would be able to count the number of deaths on their hands each day.
Not at all. It is the speed of paperwork, to make sure of information.
Again, you can say the data is botched but at least we have data, contrary certain parts of the West, Taiwan is bound by open data regulations.
If someone is run over by a drunk driver and dies a few months later from the injuries, many countries will not prosecute the driver for manslaughter. That is the approach to COVID deaths in certain Western countries now that they have declared “the plague is over”. For this analogy purposes, Taiwan will still accuse the drunk, as even if the victim was old, fat, had the trifecta of high blood pressure, high cholesterol and high sugar, his death was caused by the car inflicted injuries. The other factors did not help the rate of survival but bottom line is the drunk driver speeding in a ton vehicle and hitting him did.
There’s no saving you, @Icon. 
Yes, I’m sure that the CDC is sending out crack teams of experts to rigorously determine the cause of death for corpses that tested positive post mortem two months prior, after apparently experiencing no COVID symptoms. Then it may take a while for them to file the paperwork and dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s so they’re reporting the best possible data. Sounds plausible. 
The data is botched. You and the other “COVID forever” people here are welcome to take it at face value if you want, as I guess most people do and I guess is the intention, but it’s still botched. It gives the impression of the CDC being open, thorough, and scientifically minded to people who don’t know any better, but when you look at it critically and for more than a moment there’s very little value there. It’s just for show.
I’ll give the CDC the benefit of the doubt here and assume that they’re aware of why it’s botched and the problems with what they’re releasing (because it’s pretty obvious and they’re presumably more than qualified enough to know), but nonetheless that’s what they’re releasing and expecting people to believe (with some success, apparently), so you have you to wonder why.
Besides, the daily numbers are demonstrably false because of the many asymptomatic cases and people not reporting, and you don’t need to know every afternoon whether 25 or 28 people purportedly died on a given day (especially when they didn’t, because they died days, weeks, or months prior and generally had other serious conditions going on). The relevant government bodies should probably keep track of causes of death to the best of their ability, maybe even release some numbers to the public once a week, but it’s totally unnecessary to do this every day in a press conference. It serves no purpose at this point, and I suspect that it’s contributed to the obsession and paranoia a few of you here seem to have developed over this.
If they announce scooter accidents and deaths same way they run this daily Covid circus (including transportation minister and all his minions wearing full face helmets through the whole conference) I bet you won’t be able to see helmetless yet fully masked scooter riders anymore 
Do you are basically telling me the numbers are botched because more people are sick than reported? Then if more people are sick than we know, deaths are also higher than we know.
It’s one of the reasons, but far from the only one. The discussion started, as it often does, with the questionable classification of COVID deaths (people with serious existing conditions and apparently no COVID-related symptoms), woefully uninformative reporting of details (whatever the hell “survey” means, again no relevant symptoms mentioned, mental illness as a pertinent chronic disease, etc.), and the ridiculous amount of time it’s taking the CDC to add a significant minority of deaths to the daily tables (it’s bizarre that this keeps happening at all, but I would say that somehow newly discovered deaths 1–2 months prior have no place being added to the table for the current day – they skew the daily numbers upward and should just be updated in the CDC’s main database).
Are you saying that you think the daily reported case numbers are a reliable indicator of the actual number of new infections in Taiwan on a given day? I honestly don’t understand how anyone can buy that. It’s not even a question that more people are “sick” (let’s say “positive”) than reported – the only question is just how unreliable the daily numbers are. Even from the CDC’s own admission, a large proportion of positive people are asymptomatic or mildly sick, meaning that they might not realize it, might not bother to test, or might not bother to report, especially when reporting is disincentivized by needing to quarantine, lost income, and having to pay for the privilege.
I’ve no idea what proportion of cases are being detected/reported, i.e., how much of an underestimate the daily numbers are. Maybe the daily reported cases broadly reflect the daily actual cases (in terms of trend, but not value), assuming that people’s likelihood to report remains roughly constant (I’m guessing it decreases somewhat over time as compliance wanes and more people know people who tested positive and were fine, but perhaps the majority of people who know they’re positive are still reporting).
Anyway, I think at some point the daily reported case numbers became of limited use – at least for being announced in a daily press conference like they’re a big deal – and any trends would be better monitored by sewage testing (which the CDC curiously seems to have stopped announcing since this outbreak took off (?), though they were never doing much of that compared to other places), hospitalization rates, and (accurately reported) deaths.
I don’t understand what you mean here? The second part of the sentence doesn’t seem to follow on logically from the first. Why would deaths be higher because actual cases are higher?
It seems to me, from the low-quality data that they publish each day, that the CDC is going to considerable effort to add deaths to the daily tables when their inclusion there might not be justified, e.g., people apparently without relevant symptoms, testing people post mortem, and inexplicably digging up new deaths from two months ago. In other words, it appears that deaths are lower than we know while cases are higher than we know.
Hard to pretend a death is something else. I suppose you could say it is just allergies but people would start asking questions when you didn’t move for a few days.
Yeah, but then the CDC will hunt you down two months later and stick a swab up your nose anyway.
Just an update on the situation at Taoyuan Airport for arriving passengers. My partner returned to Taiwan overnight and had to go through the arrival procedures this morning. Arrival was on CI52 (passenger count was about 75) which landed at 04:30 and he was through and waiting for the “Special Taxi” by 05:20 - which was only about 15 minutes wait, during which time Baggage and clothes were doused by disinfectant. About 4 other flights arrived around the same time, so it worked out pretty well.
Fantastic to hear!
When do you plan to be back in the land of the falling NTD?
Guy
Well, I usually return after Double 10 - when the heat has started going down, so time will tell. I dont wish to get mixed up in the 3+4 or whatever it might be, so I need to consider that too.
As to the falling NTD, its actually the rising USD - look at the other countries vs the USD.
It is just basic math: if more people are sick than we know of, then that would actually explain the higher rate of COVID-19 deaths in Taiwan. The percentage of severe cases reflect what actually gets to the hospital, not the whole population. So it makes sense that the pie is actually larger and the percentage of deaths more reflecting the overall infected population.
The West has faltered in terms of keeping track of cases and has ultimately given up. In Taiwan they have a basic methodology and a comprehensive data collection due to universal health care. But as you and others including myself have pointed out, there is underreporting of cases. As to deaths, there might be some profit from common folk if they paid COVID insurance to get classified as COVID death. I really cannot see how a government that patted itself on the back with a record of 70 deaths would suddenly pad the numbers to…what, keep the measures indefinitely…?? There is little economic benefits there. Not that much to be made from vaccines, masks are piling up, restaurants are open, internal tourism is booming - no parking at Jiufen at 9am.
So please elaborate your accusations or rather，maligning of the local authorities regarding a will to manipulate numbers. But “because everyone does it, you cannot trust the government” is not gonna cut it. I mean, if you live in Taiwan, and are currently in Taiwan, what benefits do you see of the padding? And no, I will not take “it is only a flu” either as scientifically it is not, I was here in 2003 and it was not then nor is it now.
That makes no sense at all. People who die “of COVID” go through a pretty well-characterized meltdown before they expire. They don’t just have the sniffles one day and drop dead the next (or indeed 14 weeks later).
The cases that are not being counted are the ones that nobody even notices. In other words they don’t lead to death, ever.
Taiwan’s COVID death rate isn’t higher than anywhere else. We don’t even know what the death rate is, thanks to the CECC playing sillybuggers with the numbers. I think it was @afterspivak who mentioned the US death rate: about 1 per million (per day) and those are “of” not “with”. Actual “died of COVID” events are probably comparable to gunshot deaths (0.4/million/day). COVID deaths, worldwide, are down in the noise, and Taiwan is no exception as far as anyone can tell. The daily announcement is, at best, a waste of government money.
This is indeed a mystery, but since they ARE doing that, one has to assume that they have a reason. Just because you and I are not privy to that reason doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
That’s what happens when “fairness” and “no one gets left behind” takes over survival of the fittest in education.
Bunches of corpses rotting in rocking chairs. 
They need to pad the numbers so they can prolong the status quo until after elections. They don’t have the cojones to do the right thing immediately.
I’m not so sure. They’ve made maybe 30 percent of the population so terrified that it will take years to bring them back to their senses.
Is 9/12 the date students no longer need to stay at home if a classmate gets Covid? My nephew missed last Monday, but I heard it’s changing soon.