(Molly Bruns, Headline USA) The Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Health and Human Services have been asked to recalculate COVID hospitalizations in the U.S, Politico reported.
The Biden administration has requested that numbers of patients who go to the facility because they have COVID be counted separately from individuals who go in for other reasons and test positive after being admitted.
The stated motivation of this recount is “to get a more accurate sense of COVID’s impact accross the country and whether the virus is causing severe disease,” despite the fact that there have already been multiple studies on COVID that state it is mostly harmless to those without a preexisting illness.
“You need a panel of experts to review the cases to adjudicate if a hospitalization is for a person who came in for COVID or with COVID,” said Eric Topol, a professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research.
“It’s not something that is coded in the chart,” he said. “A lot of people will say an individual came in with Covid, but it was actually the Covid that exacerbated the lung or heart disease.”
Biden officials are focused on the care given for the Omicron spread, undoubtedly hoping to lower the total COVID case count before the midterm elections.
The announcement of the recalculation has been met with wide skepticism and distrust of the administration’s motivations:
Are we going all the way back to 2020 to fix the count or just starting from when Biden came to power?
— dp/dy (@quant_smart) February 8, 2022
This is why I leave the math and science stuff to the experts who are trained to ignore the biases of common sense. pic.twitter.com/ixtb2NvCTn
— Second City Bureaucrat (@CityBureaucrat) February 8, 2022
“The administration’s goal is to get a more accurate sense of Covid-19’s impact across the country and whether the virus is causing severe disease.” Imagine a virus so deadly that we need to completely derail society to mitigate it, yet we are unable to tell how severe it is…
— simsala (@Simsala8081) February 7, 2022
The administration is openly mocking us at this point. For two years we’ve had scary death tolls shoved in our faces and all of a sudden the reporting metrics change in a way which will inevitably reduce the number of Covid deaths? Absolutely shameless.
— Dwight K Schrute (@DwightKSchruteA) February 8, 2022
