It is deeply encouraging to see the "public health" field slowly but surely figure out the stuff the rest of us realized, oh, around March of 2020:
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the United States is experiencing around 400 covid deaths every day. At that rate, there would be nearly 150,000 deaths a year.
But are these Americans dying from covid or with covid?
That's a great question! It seems odd that you didn't ask that in March of 2020. Or December of 2020. Or June of 2021. Or April of 2022. Or, you know, any time prior to the the pandemic being a whopping three years old.
But I digress. Actually, no, I don't digress. That's the whole point. People have been arguing this literally for years: Hospitals are overcounting COVID deaths, testing protocols are too broad, COVID fatality criteria are just absurdly overlarge, and it's all just ridiculously inimical to true public health.
And yet the "experts" are only just figuring this out:
Determining the true number of hospitalizations from covid has immediate, practical purposes. "It allows for better forecasting of hospital capacity," Doron told me. "If our hospital beds are full and we attribute it to covid, we might think that we'll get the beds back when the wave of infections is over. But if people are sick from other causes, the beds could stay full."
Um, yes. That's obvious. And it's vitally important to acknowledge that. If your hospitals are full with COVID patients, there's good reason to be worried. If your hospitals are full of just the normal number of patients and many of them just happen to have an incidental COVID diagnosis, that's very different. The distinction is absolutely crucial.
Well, better late than never, I suppose:
[K]nowing who exactly is dying from covid can help us identify who is truly vulnerable. These are the patients we need to protect through better vaccines and treatments.
There's only one thing you can say to the people who took 36 long, grueling months to figure out the most basic things about this pandemic:
