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.