Is there any effort to retroactively count the actual Covid deaths? Because it appears that it could be greatly inflated because of the following practice as described in this press meet..
>Q Can you talk about your concerns about deaths being misreported by coronavirus because of either testing or standards for how they’re characterized?
>DR. BIRX: So, I think, in this country, we’ve taken a very liberal approach to mortality, and I think the reporting here has been pretty straightforward over the last five to six weeks. Prior to that, when there wasn’t testing in January and February, that’s a very different situation and unknown. There are other countries that if you had a pre-existing condition and let’s say the virus caused you to go to the ICU and then have a heart or kidney problem — some countries are recording that as a heart issue or a kidney issue and not a COVID-19 death. Right now, we’re still recording it, and we’ll — I mean, the great thing about having forms that come in and a form that has the ability to mark it as COVID-19 infection — the intent is, right now, that those — if someone dies with COVID-19, we are counting that as a COVID-19 death.
Some public health agencies have retroactively revised the COVID-19 death count down so as to exclude people who died after a positive test but from a different primary cause. But I don't know how widespread that is.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 14.4 ms ] thread>Q Can you talk about your concerns about deaths being misreported by coronavirus because of either testing or standards for how they’re characterized?
>DR. BIRX: So, I think, in this country, we’ve taken a very liberal approach to mortality, and I think the reporting here has been pretty straightforward over the last five to six weeks. Prior to that, when there wasn’t testing in January and February, that’s a very different situation and unknown. There are other countries that if you had a pre-existing condition and let’s say the virus caused you to go to the ICU and then have a heart or kidney problem — some countries are recording that as a heart issue or a kidney issue and not a COVID-19 death. Right now, we’re still recording it, and we’ll — I mean, the great thing about having forms that come in and a form that has the ability to mark it as COVID-19 infection — the intent is, right now, that those — if someone dies with COVID-19, we are counting that as a COVID-19 death.
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