I think this is harder to prove than you'd think. You can't just prove that Theranos did a blood test and someone died, you'd have to prove that if Theranos did their jobs correctly that person would have survived.
It ends up being a long chain of probabilities. Would the real test have shown a false negative? Would the treatment have definitely cured them (given that most treatments aren't 100% effective)? Would they have even sought treatment? Etc, etc.
It's kind of like how if a substance ends up causing cancer it's very hard to prove that an individual got cancer from that substance. You can see the effect in aggregate, but at an individual level it's very hard to prove they got it from this substance instead of pollution or smoking or eating too much meat or flying or whatever.
This is the same. You can say in aggregate that the patients would have lived longer with accurate tests, but it's hard to say what an individual outcome would have been.
It ends up being a long chain of probabilities. Would the real test have shown a false negative? Would the treatment have definitely cured them (given that most treatments aren't 100% effective)? Would they have even sought treatment? Etc, etc.
It's kind of like how if a substance ends up causing cancer it's very hard to prove that an individual got cancer from that substance. You can see the effect in aggregate, but at an individual level it's very hard to prove they got it from this substance instead of pollution or smoking or eating too much meat or flying or whatever.
This is the same. You can say in aggregate that the patients would have lived longer with accurate tests, but it's hard to say what an individual outcome would have been.