Qvart
Senior Member
I don't think the issue is that underlying conditions make people more vulnerable to infection. The issue is that people who have underlying conditions and contract COVID are less able to fight it and have more severe symptoms than others who don't have underlying conditions. But even in healthy people, there are many who have extremely severe symptoms because their immune system overreacts to the virus and that creates a whole new set of problems. Not to mention those who recover but then have recurring symptoms for months afterwards and those who have long term/permanent damage from the virus.My understanding is that the "cause of death" is whatever primarily led to the person's passing.
So, if someone died from respiratory failure due to Covid-19 but also had heart disease and diabetes, their death would be attributed primarily to Covid-19.
Their heart disease and diabetes were complicating factors that may have made them more vulnerable to infection by the virus, but were conditions that did not directly result in death.
My brother had sleep apnea, but that did not make him more susceptible to contracting the virus. What it did do, however, is make it much harder to fight. The coroner listed the cause of death as "COVID-related." There's a lot of debate about how to properly record deaths related to COVID and it may be a long time before we know the full extent of the damage caused by this pandemic, but I suspect it's much worse than we think. Anyway, getting back to preexisting conditions like sleep apnea - yeah, that combined with COVID was lethal for my brother, but he was in no danger of dying anytime soon from sleep apnea. He died from COVID.