Governor admits COVID hospitalizations overcounted
After top health official confessed she misled parents to promote vaccination of kids
WND | By Art Moore | January 4, 2022
Acknowledging that the number of hospitalizations due to COVID-19 has been overstated, New York Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul announced hospitals now must clarify if patients with the novel coronavirus came to the hospital due to symptoms of COVID-19 or because of another health issue.
Saying she wants to “always be honest with New Yorkers about how bad this is,” Hochul said the state had reached “a critical moment” and “we’re going to start asking some questions.”
“We talked about the hospitalizations. I have always wondered, we’re looking at the hospitalizations of people testing positive in a hospital,” she said Monday. “Is that person in the hospital because of COVID or did they show up there and are routinely tested and showing positive and they may have been asymptomatic or even just had the sniffles?”
An example, she said, someone who gets in a car accident, goes to the emergency room and tests positive for COVID.
New York state will start breaking down its hospital figures between "with" and "because" of COVID-19, Governor Kathy Hochul says.
— BNO Newsroom (@BNODesk) January 4, 2022
"We're going to start asking some questions .. is that person in the hospital because of COVID" or because of a car crash? pic.twitter.com/ifqXV4OBVj
Last week, as WND reported, New York state’s acting health commissioner admitted at a news conference with Hochul that she misled parents about the magnitude of hospitalizations for COVID-19 among children, explaining she raised fears of a concerning trend to “motivate” them to get their children vaccinated.
Hochul said Monday that after making random calls to hospital leaders she found about a 20% to 50% difference in patients being treated for COVID-19 as opposed to patients there for other reasons who tested positive.
A CDC study published in July found 95% of those hospitalized for COVID-19 had at least one underlying medical condition. The most common conditions were essential hypertension (50.4%), disorders of lipid metabolism (49.4%) and obesity (33%). The data were drawn from hospitalized patients aged 18 years or older with COVID-19 from March 2020 through March 2021 in more than 800 U.S. hospitals.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis also is asking hospitals to make a distinction between patients being treated for COVID-19 and those who test positive but came to the hospital because of another ailment.
“I think that’s an important distinction to make when you have a variant like omicron which is much more widespread,” DeSantis said Monday. “You are going to have people who get into a car accident and go into the emergency room. They’re swabbing everybody, and you’re going to have people that have incidental positives.”
“If you look at the children that are hospitalized, many of them are hospitalized with COVID, as opposed to because of COVID.”
A major Florida hospital system said nearly half the people hospitalized with COVID-19 were admitted due to “non-COVID reasons,” Newsmax reported Tuesday. Jackson Health System in Miami-Dade County also tweeted Monday that nearly 80% of those hospitalized with COVID-19 were unvaccinated.
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