> This is where Covid is listed on the death certificate as the primary cause of death. Everyone that dies of cardiac arrest or cancer also has a belly button.

Where are you getting death certificate data for 2023? I can't seem to find it yet.

If you are looking at WISQARS coded deaths, then I imagine you are already familiar with this critique:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/01/13/covid-pan...

...so I won't go rehashing it.

But in any case, it's a can of worms.

If SARS-CoV-2 disappeared magically tomorrow, do we expect overall mortality to suddenly decrease by 2%? Of course not. The deaths will just go back to being coded with their prior ICD-10 code. For example, multiple myeloma deaths caused by respiratory distress will go back to the C00 series.

But getting back to the broader point: even in the worst reading, even falling to 2% of all deaths for a deadly respiratory pathogen shows pretty good immune robustness. Some influenza is so lethal to some birds that it becomes the only cause of death for an entire flock, causing a 90% mortality rate. No other species communicates immunity across subpopulations as fast as humans.

As far as the mortality data: the change in practice to code deaths as resulting from a particular coronavirus seems like a good evolution in terms of data richness. But to clarify what it means for population mortality, we'd need to do it for other infectious pathogens, not just SARS-CoV-2. To continue the example, if HCoV-HKU1 is the pathogen resulting in lethal respiratory distress for a multiple myeloma patient, than it makes just as much sense to code that death HKU1 as it does for a patient who does from respiratory distress from COVID-19 as COVID-19.

> Everyone that dies of cardiac arrest or cancer also has a belly button.

Many of those also have COVID-19. And of those, some are coded as COVID-19 and some are not. If a person is infected with a coronavirus and dies from cardiac arrest, is it properly understood as a coronavirus death? Prior to 2020, the answer was always "no" (in fact, there was no ICD-10 code available for this (and to my knowledge, there won't be any deaths coded for coronaviruses other than COVID-19 in this year's dataset either)). But now, the answer is "yes" for only one of the five endemic coronaviruses. The data needs to catch up to the reality in order to have an actionable picture of population mortality.

> Generally there hasn't been all that much research on post-viral syndromes. To some degree that's because they don't obviously affect so many people. It could very well be that other viruses are the cause of more conditions than is currently appreciated though. Certainly the Epstein-Barr/MS results could be the tip of the iceberg. Regardless of what other viruses do, it's looking to me like Covid is likely to be pretty bad long-term, but we won't know for sure for 30+ years I suppose.

Hopefully the crazy dearth of research on this topic is something that the COVID-19 pandemic will have changed for the better. It's about time.

> it's looking to me like Covid is likely to be pretty bad long-term, but we won't know for sure for 30+ years I suppose.

Given the unavailability of data on the matter, I'm not sure how you can draw that conclusion. Are people reporting post-viral syndromes following COVID-19? Yes. Are they more frequent than with the other four endemic coronaviruses? We can't know, because we've never tracked this before. But we do know that what we have suddenly started calling "long covid" has been known to science for decades (and can be evinced by searching, for example, "{hku1|oc43|nl61} cardiovascular" on Google Scholar).

And sadly, I don't know that we'll really know much better in 30 years. Hopefully we'll understand more about the prognosis, and have some treatments. But distinguishing between the post-infection syndromes of the five endemic coronaviruses might be impossible.