Longtime Media Covid Hawk: We’re Probably Overcounting Covid-Caused Deaths, By a Lot
Washington Post columnist Leana Wen, whom I might have once dismissed as a “Branch Covidian,” has written an important piece stating the obvious for the Post: The United States is overestimating the number of hospitalizations and deaths that can be attributed to the now not-so-novel coronavirus pandemic.
The writer and former Planned Parenthood president came to this conclusion after speaking with physicians and public health experts, including Dr. Shira Doron, whose work has helped reveal that between July 2022 and this month, only about 30 percent of Massachusetts hospital patients with covid were hospitalized because of covid.
At Tufts Medical Center in Boston, Doron told Wen that at times, “the proportion of those hospitalized because of covid were as low as 10 percent of the total number reported.”
Wen and Doron acknowledge that Doron’s method — looking at which patients were prescribed a steroid oftentimes used to treat covid patients — is imperfect. Some patients may not have been prescribed the steroid, and for others, covid may have been a contributing rather than the primary cause of their hospitalization or death. But all-in-all, Doron’s research has shown the steroid’s use to be a decent proxy.
Robin Dretler, the former president of Georgia’s chapter of Infectious Diseases Society of America, concurs with Wen and Doran’s conclusion, estimating that at Emory Decatur Hospital, where he works as an attending physician, “90 percent of patients diagnosed with covid are actually in the hospital for some other illness.”
In a CNN appearance on Tuesday morning, Wen argued that “as a result of vaccines and as a result of a lot of people getting covid and having some level of immunity to it, we’re seeing far fewer cases of that kind of severe covid.”
“And yet, hospitals are still routinely testing everyone who’s getting admitted for covid, and so we’re seeing many people who are hospitalized with covid and I think its important to separate out who’s being hospitalized because of it,” she continued, before making the case for a more transparent and detailed reporting structure.
That Wen is now arguing that the broader public health threat from covid is being overstated is of great significance, given her prior positions on the subject.
Through last January, Wen was arguing for tighter controls that would require heavy-duty mask-wearing in public. In December 2021, she submitted that “everyone, including children, should be wearing at least a 3-ply surgical mask when indoors & around others of unknown vaccination status.” All of this came nearly a year after the vaccines became available to the entirety of the adult population.
But shortly after that, Wen changed her tune, realizing that Americans needed their leaders to take a more balanced approach to the pandemic with a focus on risk mitigation, not elimination.
At a time when Centers for Disease Control director Rochelle Walensky and other bureaucrats are either calling for or edging back toward calling for mask mandates again, Wen’s data-driven analysis is a breath of fresh air.
Wen’s column admits out loud what many skeptics of continued mask-wearing and other pandemic-era restrictions have been arguing for quite awhile. The findings of Doron and others — data released by the state of New York in January 2022 revealed that 43 percent were hospitalized with other maladies before later testing positive for the virus — should cause the public, press, and policymakers to squint a little harder at reported national covid numbers, and adjust their level of alarm accordingly.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
