On Sunday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo became the latest in a string of elected officials, including President Trump, to question the death toll from the coronavirus, calling the process of assigning cause of death “fairly random.”
In May, the governor also questioned the use of “probable” deaths in public tallies, noting that New York would continue to keep these deaths from its total counts, even though many states and New York City post them publicly.
But public health experts say the method used to count deaths from a disease like Covid-19 is decades-old and some amount of uncertainty is simply part of the process. Continue reading.