COVID-19 and "Cause of death" field

I have been compiling a list of authors killed by COVID-19 for the State of the Thing Newsletter. We have all heard of a few big names, but the list of working authors and academics felled by the disease just goes on and on.

Anyway, after making a big list, I realized I could put it all in Common Knowledge, so I made a field for "Cause of Death." You can find it next to "Place of Death" on all author pages. It can, of course, be used for any cause. It will be interesting—or depressing—to look at other causes of death too.

I'm going to be working through all the authors here, adding the cause of death. If you have more, I'd like to hear them. And if you'd like to spruce up these authors' pages, that would be good too.

Here's a link to COVID-19 deaths: https://www.librarything.com/commonknowledge/search.php?f=textid&q=4412187

The paragraph:

"The Bad: Coronavirus has hit the literary and academic world particularly hard. A partial list of its victims include the Chilean novelist Luis Sepúlveda (NYT obit), actress and Holywood biographer Patricia Bosworth (NYT obit), Tony-winning playwright Terrance McNally (NYT obit), John Conway (NYT obit), creator of the cellular-automaton "Conways Game of Life," art critic and curator Maurice Burger, art critic William H. Gerdts, art critic and artist David C. Driskell, architect and author Michael Sorkin (NYT obit), Argentinian comic book artist Juan Giménez, Catalan philologist Germà Colón, Puerto Rican author and activist Iris M. Zavala, sociologist—and LibraryThing Early Reviews alumnus—William B. Helmreich, American and presidential historian Henry Graff, ethnobotanist Arthur Whistler, Spanish historian Carlos Seco Serrano, Irish travel author Tim Robinson, experimental Belgian author Marcel Moreau, French priest and ecumenist Michel Lelong, Jesuit authors Henri Madelin, André Manaranche and Philippe Lécrivain, Guyanese poet and literary critic Michael Gikes, Romanian anti-communist activist Paul Goma, film critic William Wolfe, philosopher of mathematics Mark Steiner, medievalists Francis Rapp and Michel Parisse, linguist Robert Chaudenson, French historian Jacques Le Brun, and French philosopher Lucien Sève.
"

Okay, I've got cause of death and birth and death dates for all of them here: https://www.librarything.com/commonknowledge/search.php?f=textid&q=4412187 . I also added Wikipedia pages and obituaries, where I found them.

I'm going to start adding others. I'd love help with other data.

I've gone down to March 25 on this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deaths_due_to_coronavirus_disease_2019 . Going for dinner.

Thanks Lilithcat. I can see you are adding some. Tell me your plan of attack? Are you on that Wikipedia page?

Yes, I just finished through 3/29. And now I'm going to have dinner!

You do realize, don't you, that adding that field means a bunch of us will be going through our catalogues and hunting up causes of death for our dead authors.

>5 lilithcat: You do realize, don't you, that adding that field means a bunch of us will be going through our catalogues and hunting up causes of death for our dead authors.

Exactly what I've been doing.

Okay, I'm picking it up at 3/39. I'll go until the end of April.

Okay, I've done through April 7. Ow. Lots. But we're up to 72.

Done through April 12.

I'm just doing a run through my SF&F collection. First CK work I've done in years. Wheeeeee!

Looks like people are up to date with the Wiki page.

Thank you for adding this to CK, Tim.

I've just added birth and death dates to 20 or 30 of the authors in my catalogue - now I'll have to go back and do this too! Work, work, work...

Another useful wikipedia list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_people_by_cause_of_death

Any style guide suggestions about naming ailments and complications thereof?

Okay, going to do April 13-15.

Okay, I've gone through April 21. I'm going to go look for Italians now.

Okay, I've gone to 100. I hit most of the big lists, and did some random Googling too.

https://www.librarything.com/commonknowledge/search.php?f=textid&q=4412187

>2 timspalding:
How did you determine cause of birth?

Snort. Well…

>17 timspalding: I don't think there is a Wikipedia page for Italian people dead for Covid-19.
>19 suitable1: I remember a joke about cause of birth (rectius, conception) but it is in bad taste.

“Judicial decapitation” for Sir Walter Raleigh. This will help to speed along the hours of lockdown!

>22 abbottthomas: This is going to be salutary but also deeply depressing. Executions. Concentration camps. Suicides.

>23 konallis:

But there is always the list of people who died from laughter!

I made a field for "Cause of Death."

This is why I love LT sooo much!

Now, Tim, I'm sure you have lots of free time at present. How about a new project? I would reeaaallly like a mashup between del.icio.us and Pinterest, given that one has died and the other is going in a rather strange direction.

>24 lilithcat: Goodness! Apparently laughter isn't the best medicine.

Making sure people here know of the LT project listing author deaths, which includes specification when the cause was COVID-19 (tagged coronavirus): recent thread here.

>25 sarahemmm: a mashup between del.icio.us and Pinterest
Try Pocket. Might be close to what you want.

>27 elenchus: I'm not sure you can call it an LT project when it is a group that only lets members post. It is a project of an LT group.

>29 MarthaJeanne:

Good clarification. I'll add that I'm not a member of the group.

28 conceptDawg Nah... you can't add text or edit the displayed pic in Pocket. Pinboard is dead (or at least unsupported). I'm currently adding tags to a backed up copy of my Pinterest data: hopefully something will come along that I can import it do, else I will have to write a front end myself.

You'd think others have the same issue.

>31 sarahemmm: Pinboard is dead? It's still working for me.

>25 sarahemmm:, 28

Isn't Pinterest just del.icio.us with pictures anyway?

Unfortunately not, cj - no tags. And they cut the dscription down to 500chars.

Pinboard - happily took my $11, but nothing further, so I can't use it. It was the closest I found to what I want.

>34 sarahemmm: What do you need from pinboard that it won't do? I'm curious because I, too, am a happy heavy user. There's certainly things it doesn't, and will never, do, that pinterest and delicious and pocket can, but it works for me at what it does, and very well.

(And, like LT, it's a site still run and supported by its creator with a specific ethos of staying out of the startup circus and concentrating on core services for loyal users. If you want a bookmarking site that's run the way LT is, that's pinboard.)

Hi melannen - I can't use Pinboard because, although they happily accepted my money, nothing further happened. I have posted to the google group, but my posts are still awaiting moderation. I PMed someone else, who can post to the group, but gets no response from Maciej. Its a shame, because it does look pretty good for what i want.

Oh, you mean you signed up for an account, but then never got access to the account? That's rough. And I guess it was quite awhile ago, since the prices have gone up from $11.

You've tried the support email, too, right, with the email you signed up with? maciej did pull back on a lot of things the last couple years while trying to save the world and probably isn't on the google group much. I don't see anything on the google group about problems with account creation, which is also weird.

Apparently he has gone walkabout - nobody is getting replies. Of course there won't be any messages about account creation, because we can't post until our posts have been approved. Kind of a Catch-22.

Oh, I thought you meant your friend got through to the group, sorry. Yeah, that is the downside to a site that is fully creator-run. Usually saying "Hi there is a problem with money" gets through even when nothing else does, but maciej is not always *there* these days, it's true.

>1 timspalding: Thank you for this new field. I have just had the pleasure of filling it for Johan August Wahlberg who died, I believe uniquely among LT authors, when he was trampled by an elephant in what is now Botswana.

>40 hfglen: What a way to go!

Courting controversy with that feature. Anybody has an opinion on Amelia Earhart?

>42 Kuiperdolin: "Unknown"?

>43 anglemark:

Just leave it blank if you don't know.

>44 lilithcat: Of course. I was unclear, sorry. That was my opinion on the cause of death. The effect is that the field should be left blank.

>42 Kuiperdolin: "Airplane crash"?

>46 bnielsen: I'd hate to place what is, at best, an educated guess in a field, when the truth is that we don't know. She could have successfully landed on an island and starved to death, or survived an emergency landing in the sea and been eaten by a shark. Etc etc.

I read the Japanes might have killed her.

>47 anglemark: "airplane didn't return"? But yes, I get your point. Maybe the airplane did return and she decided to marry old McDonald and move to the farm and not tell anybody.

>44 lilithcat:, >45 anglemark: It seems to me there might be some value in filling in "unknown" (or similar) rather than simply leaving the field blank for cases like this. "This information isn't known" is an epistemic declaration of sorts: it tells us there is some mystery surrounding the person's fate. Whereas an empty field might simply mean that nobody has gotten around to filling it in.

Mind you, the further we go back in the past the more authors there will be for whom the cause of death isn't known, because it simply wasn't recorded at the time or because the records weren't preserved. In such cases -- where we know very little about the person in general -- explicitly listing "unknown" as cause of death seems less appropriate, as it implies some reasonable expectation of being able to know that piece of information.

>50 spiphany:

You know, I've been thinking about this, and you are right about the benefit of using "unknown".

>50 spiphany:

I've actually been thinking about this and, upon reflection, have come to see the benefit of "unknown".

>50 spiphany: Good point

>40 hfglen: "Johan August Wahlberg who died, I believe uniquely among LT authors, when he was trampled by an elephant in what is now Botswana."

Ilse Frapan according to Wikipedia, had her friend shoot her, being terminally ill with stomach cancer.

"Unheilbar krank (Magenkrebs) ließ Ilse Frapan sich 1908 von ihrer Freundin Emma Mandelbaum erschießen, die nach der Tat gleichfalls aus dem Leben schied." (German Wikipedia). Does that mean that Emma then shot herself, or merely that she subsequently died? It's easy to forget how desperate a diagnosis cancer once was.

>54 Cynfelyn: Nothing conclusive, but Googling them brings up a lot of secondary sources that use expressions like “gemeinsamer Freitod” or “suicide pact”.

I have a question. I wrote that Giulio Giorello died of CoViD-19, but it would be more correct to write that he died for complications after CoViD-19: he was discarged from the hospital because he had no more the virus, but his body was so ruined that he eventually died in a few weeks. Which should the correct cause of death be?

>56 .mau.: I have similar problems with HIV/AIDS vs. complications

>56 .mau.:

Maybe just use "complications of CoViD-19"?

>56 .mau.:

Excellent question, and a good example. I've been listing the thing that triggered the complications, thinking of it as the root cause of the death. OTOH, nuance and accuracy and specificity can be good.

Another example: Nancy Spero. Her obituary in the New York Times said, "The cause was infection leading to respiratory problems that in turn caused heart failure". I entered "infection leading to heart failure," and someone else already shortened that to "heart failure". I could see the point in each of the three options, frankly.

Jack Parsons died later at the hospital of various injuries suffered in the explosion that killed him. To say that he died of "various injuries" rather than "laboratory explosion" would efface the salient element of the story.

We all eventually die of complications following birth.

>60 paradoxosalpha: well, if a grand piano falls from 20th floor and kills me I won't say that my death was for complications following birth...

I know that there are a lot of nuances. For example, probably in many cases cancer is not the direct cause of death, it's just that the body eventually breaks down. With a virus, however, the difference is more visible: if it is no more present, it is difficult to say "it's the virus's fault" even if there was no previous known disease.

Another case is the death of Ennio Morricone. Italian news sources (and American too, I understand) say that the cause was a femur he broke some days ago. While I can understand that multiple broken bones can be a cause of death, I have some doubt about a broken leg.

Needless to say, I have no answer for my doubts: probably "broken leg" for Morricone and "complications of CoViD-19" for Giorello are the best things we can write. I am talking about these just because maybe someone has a better answer!

>61 .mau.: It's an interesting discussion, and I know I've read articles in the past that discussed direct vs indirect causes of death, which seems to be what we're dealing with in some of these examples.

For me, I work backward from the end: If I want to look at a list of authors who died due to Covid-19, I would certainly want Giulio Giorello to be on that list. If I click on "COVID-19" in his Common Knowledge on his author page, it takes me to LT's page for that entry, which shows anything that includes the words "COVID-19". So for me, either the bare-bones "COVID-19" or your suggested "complications of COVID-19" would be included in a search, and thus I think you should feel free to use whichever you feel is more appropriate.

Nota bene: I noticed on that page that Mory Kanté has as part of their cause of death "COVID-19 collateral mortality", which is an interesting turn of phrase that could cover the Giorello case as well, if you were looking to be consistent. Mind, I'm not suggesting that we need to try to match exactly; just an observation.

And finally, perhaps Morricone likewise could be listed as "complications resulting from a broken leg" or something similar.

>62 rosalita: "COVID-19 collateral mortality"

That sounds like someone who died when they couldn't get emergency care for appendicitis because the hospital was full of coronavirus patients.

paradoxosalpha (#63):

Or who starved after losing their job due to the lockdown, or who put off a checkup that would have found their cancer, or one of any of another thousand reasons that isn't actually "contracted the virus".

>61 .mau.: BBC says 'complications following a fall'. When someone is 91, there can easily be complications after a broken leg.

>60 paradoxosalpha: If only we were vampires and not humans, it would be simpler. We could narrow it down to beheading, staked, sunlight, and maybe one or two other things. No complications!

Well if you really want to make it simple - heart failure kills us all in the end.

>67 Bookmarque: My dad's death certificate listed heart failure, but in reality, it was smoking. I thought at the time, we all die from heart failure.

I knew a doctor who always put natural causes for everyone who died in a nursing home. Imagine trying to figure out which diseases you might be more susceptible to if all your grandparents died of natural causes.

I half-expect to die of supernatural causes.

Looking at old death certificates can be informative. MY wife's great-grandmother died of tuberculosis. Her father died relatively young and one of his brothers died aged 14. Their death certificates gave cause of death as 'Phthisis, rupture of a blood vessel' and 'Pulmonary condition' respectively. TB hung around families.

My great-grandfather died of erysipelas - a bacterial infection of the skin. Family legend says he was struck on the head by a cricket ball which caused the initial injury.

None of them wrote any books ;-(

It's like that old joke, "natural causes : it's fairly natural to die when you get a bullet through the head".

>56 .mau.:

Have you any further thoughts on what you'll be doing?

For what it's worth, I just added "(complications)" after "Alzheimer's disease" to Lucius J. Barker. So many things don't kill you directly.

When I search for information in the "cause of death" field, I don't do it as:
A close relative who wants to know exactly what the loved one died of.
Not even as a judge, public prosecutor, or lawyer who needs to know the exact cause of death in order to establish legal facts.
I am also not a pathologist, forensic doctor or other medical specialist who wants to expand their professional knowledge.

I do this out of curiosity and as a medical layperson. Of course, as a non-medical professional, I am also aware that the film music composer Ennio Morricone did not directly die from the fracture of the femur with which he was admitted to hospital at the age of 91.
It is interesting to know, however, and quenched my curiosity that Johan August Wahlberg died from the injuries he suffered from a wild elephant. Or to learn that the author and journalist Niklaus Maienberg committed suicide.

I don't have to know the last detail in LT that led to her death. If I am interested in more details, I can do that nowadays simply by using the Internet.
But in a few years it will be good to know or be reminded of who, e.g. died of the Spanish flu (1918-1920) or the consequences of the COVID-19 virus (1919 to ???).

>73 karenb: probably your idea of adding "(complications)" is the best we can do, and moreover it's quite general. I think I'll stick with that one.

Thought: Would it be good to start a Best Practices topic for Cause of death? And if so, should we have a thread for each specific conversation?

Possible areas for discussion: suicide, medical terms vs. plain language, cancer (specify the type, or not?), and what else?

>76 karenb: I think that's a good idea even it's not an especially active discussion.

>76 karenb: Did a best practices discussion get started? Would probably be good. I've noticed someone editing these fields to trim them down (among other things, Paul Kalanithi's and Stephen F. Cohen's lung cancer -> cancer). It seems a shame to lose this information, particularly if it turns out that people feel strongly enough about keeping a clean field that we should put the extra information in a parenthetical instead. The field isn't easily recoverable (at least not by me) since the history of removed information isn't an expandable box (anymore... was it before the LT2? Not sure) for longer entries.

karenb, for instance, your cause-of-death to xxxtentacion got edited from gunshot to shot and birthdate/deathdate removed, for no apparent reason.

>78 parlerodermime: I'm in favor of being more specific, especially in cases like xxxtentacion where the shorter form is ambiguous (were they shot by a gun? arrow? cannon?).

>79 amanda4242: Me too, as do presumably the large number of helpers who include details when adding cause of death.

I note that Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. died of epilepsy acc'd to what his wife writes on his website, but of "COPD and other issues" acc'd Wikipedia, citing a Locus obituary.

What to do in such cases - just put it down as "disputed"?

>81 AndreasJ: His wife writes, 'Joe has lost his short but intense battle against epilepsy.' Could this be bad translation? It just doesn't make a lot of sense.

>82 MarthaJeanne:

Maybe? A short battle with COPD doesn’t make obvious sense either.

Perhaps the epilepsy was one of the "other issues" mentioned in Wikipedia?

Also see: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?id=157811340895910&story_fbid=3072466...

>84 lilithcat:

Thanks. Sounds like he may have had both.

>81 AndreasJ: I think disputes (or, in the case of two causes of death? better for indexing?) might be a good use case for using two fields for cause of death.

This is a different version of a dispute, but for Lucy Maud Montgomery, I added two separate fields for her cause of death. Coronary thrombosis was the long-recorded cause of death, but some descendants of hers alleged that they had long-suspected her death to be a suicide or accidental (pain) drug overdose due to a piece of paper they found near her bed.... which a later biographer looked at and thinks it was actually a misplaced page of a book she was developing due to her usual style of scribbling thoughts and numbering the pages. I clearly couldn't write that much in the field, but it seemed appropriate to at least allude to the two causes and write disputed in a parenthetical so that someone can look into it if they're interested. (And we're creating a standard, so I thought I'd mention I did it a while back in case it's controversial!)

The Pulver situation sounds like multiple conditions led to his passing and that it's probably worth writing them in different fields so that they index correctly.

>77 aspirit: Thanks!

>78 parlerodermime: No, I did not start a best practices topic yet. If you want to, please do! Otherwise I will get to it eventually.

As you have noticed, one account in particular likes to reduce the COD information, particularly with "cancer". (It's a private account now, which means there's no way for other users to ask them about it.) I know that I sometimes include more info than some people prefer, but I definitely disagree with reducing all types of cancer to "cancer".

I've started a best practices thread.

https://www.librarything.com/topic/324608

When someone enters "COVID-19" in a work's People/Characters field, it shows up in the list of authors who have died from the disease.

I would rather someone doesn't misuse Common Knowledge fields, but being unable to control that, can we get a list that excludes the virus being counted as a person?

One of the ways LT's list of COVID-19 deaths is used is how military casualty lists are, as a way to confirm the fate of people, including those we've known personally by have lost track of in everything that's been happening. I doubt I'm the only reader who is upset by seeing works or the actual killer virus among the names of the deceased.

Lorax is right to question causes of death in 2020 and 2021 not yet directly known to be "caused" by COVID-19. And that "caused by" problem is exponentially worse in countries like India which are experiencing a massive wave of COVID-19 infections ... nearby countries like Nepal, Thailand, and others are seeing their COVID-19 infection numbers increase rapidly as well. US epidemiologists like Ashish Jha, MD, PhD, Dean of the Brown University School of Public Health and a frequent guest on the ABC World News Tonight weeknight news show on US broadcast TV, have stated that the official COVID-19 death rate in India is a profound undercount of actual COVID-19 deaths there.

Duration of the COVID-19 pandemic: Medical estimates for the 1918 pandemic are that it lasted about 2 years. The problem, however, with estimating the duration of the SARS2 pandemic is that SARS2 is a different family of viruses (coronaviruses) than H1N1, the virus that caused the 1918 pandemic, which is from the influenza virus family.

>89 aspirit:

Well, it shows up if you search for COVID overall, but the field shows up as different.

You can get JUST the cause-of-death field here https://www.librarything.com/commonknowledge/search.php?f=65&q=COVID-19

>93 timspalding: Thank you. I'll use this link instead.

>92 timspalding: I feel as if you don't understand the problems with the original list you provided, but that's okay. Everyone who looks in this thread will have the new link, too.

Although, I have a LT helper question now that it's come up. In your opinion, is the name of a virus, a list of disease symptoms, or other medical terms appropriate in the People/Characters field of CK?

>94 aspirit:

is the name of a virus, a list of disease symptoms, or other medical terms appropriate in the People/Characters field of CK?

I'm not Tim, but in my view absolutely not. Viruses, etc. are not "people" or "characters" (unless, of course, the work is one of fiction in which the virus is a sentient being).

Covid 19 pandemic would be an important event.

>94 aspirit:

Oh, I thought you were complaining about its inclusion on the search results for people who have died of it.

To the characters issues, I'm agnostic. Has such been done for other diseases and etc.?