Why did Saru say Philippa Georgiou was/is descended in Terra Firma, Part 2? And Micheal didn't even correct him. Philppa isn't descended. She went somewhere else in the portal.
Descended? Saru said she was 'deceased'. He meant it in a metaphorical sense. Since Georgiou has gone who knows where and Burnham and Saru will never, ever see her again. Georgiou might as well be dead to them
She went back to the past, so from their point-of-view she's now as dead as everyone else the Discovery crew left behind.
Michael didn't specifically tell Saru what happened, but you could tell he knew she might not really be....deceased.
Assuming Georgiou was deposited in DSC's old (pre-TOS) time frame, to set up the Section 31 series, then she would of course really BE deceased in 900+ years...
Time travel is a weird thing because although some of the people they left lived for several decades hence, to the crew of Discovery it's as if they all died at once, as if in a collective catastrophe.
So long as you own a time machine or know a time-traveling method, no one is truly dead. Someone could go back to 1930 and snatch Edith Keeler one second before she was run over by that truck and replace her with a facsimile of sorts for good measure. (like in Dead stop where Mayweather is replaced by a copy) That would be more than enough to fool doctors from the 1930s.
indeed, that was the one thing that made that episode even sadder: to prevent the nazis to gain power all Kirk needed to do was removing Edith from history, bringing her to the future would have done it perfectly. Unfortunately Kirk didn’t have access to a proper time machine and no way to tell the guardian to extract her as well.
Everyone agreed that the time wars were so horrible that time travel was band. If word got out that a Starfleet vessel used time travel, that could have started another temporal war. The highest priority had to be to keep this under wraps.