Comments by "Darlene" (@darlene2709) on "AFP News Agency"
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@stillgonnasendit5068 "How COVID Death Counts Become the Stuff of Conspiracy Theories. In the waning days of the campaign, President Donald Trump complained repeatedly about how the United States tracks the number of people who have died from COVID-19, claiming, “This country and its reporting systems are just not doing it right.”
He went on to blame those reporting systems for inflating the number of deaths, pointing a finger at medical professionals, who he said benefit financially. All that feeds into the swirling political doubts that surround the pandemic, and raises questions about how deaths are reported and tallied. Trump’s recent assertions have fueled conspiracy theories on Facebook and elsewhere that doctors and hospitals are fudging numbers to get paid more. They’ve also triggered anger from the medical community.
“The suggestion that doctors — in the midst of a public health crisis — are overcounting COVID-19 patients or lying to line their pockets is a malicious, outrageous, and completely misguided charge,” Dr. Susan R. Bailey, American Medical Association president, said in a press release.
Hospitals are paid for COVID treatment the same as for any other care, though generally, the more serious the problem, the more hospitals are paid. So, treating a ventilator patient — with COVID-19 or any other illness — would mean higher payment to a hospital than treating one who didn’t require a ventilator, reflecting the extra cost.
And what about medical examiners? Are they part of a concerted effort to overcount deaths to reap financial rewards? “Medical examiners and coroners in the U.S. are not organized enough to have a conspiracy. There are 2,300 jurisdictions,” said Dr. Sally Aiken, president of the National Association of Medical Examiners. “That’s not happening.”
For the most part, public health researchers and medical examiners agree that COVID deaths are likely being undercounted. “Doctors don’t put things on death certificates that have nothing to do with the death,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
COVID-19 can directly lead to death in someone with cancer or heart problems, even if those conditions were also serious or even expected to be fatal, he said. And the claim that some states are counting people who die in car accidents, but also test positive for COVID-19, as COVID deaths is just plain unfounded, experts said.
It relies on a concept known as “excess deaths,” which involves comparing the total number of deaths from all causes in a given period with the same period in previous years. A CDC study estimated that almost 300,000 more people died in the U.S. this year from late January through Oct. 3 than in previous years. Some of those excess deaths were no doubt COVID cases, while others may have been people who avoided medical care because of the pandemic and then died from another cause.
These excess deaths are “the best evidence” that undercounting is ongoing, said Dr. Jeremy Faust, an ER doctor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “The timing of the excess deaths exactly parallels the COVID deaths, so when COVID deaths spike, all causes of deaths spike. They are hugging each other like parallel train tracks on a graph.” Kaiser Health News
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