Something many of us have long suspected...
Roughly half of hospital patients showing up on COVID dashboards may have been admitted for another reason entirely
It’s something people have been saying since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic: how many of those deaths were people who died from the coronavirus, and how many of them were people who died with the coronavirus? If you had COVID-19 and fell off a ladder and died, would you be tallied along with the coronavirus deaths in your state?
There are many ways to tally the toll of the COVID pandemic: you can count those who have it, but that number depends on how many have been tested. You can count hospitalizations, and you can count deaths, which again, depends. The Atlantic, surprisingly, is reporting on a study that shows that 40 to 45 percent of the hospitalizations that they examined were for patients who were admitted to the hospital for entirely different reasons, such as “cancer treatment or a psychiatric episode.”