A month before his recent retirement, Dr. Anthony Fauci cautioned that the U.S. “certainly” remains in the midst of a COVID pandemic. Other experts repeatedly warn of impending “deadly” waves caused by the latest genetic variants, and recently President Biden once again extended the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency. Yet those dire warnings hinge largely on an assumption that some 400 people in the U.S. continue dying daily from the disease. There are important reasons to question this assertion, as Dr. Leana Wen explored in the Washington Post. And if therefore in fact we’re no longer in a public health emergency (which a renowned virologist in Germany concluded last month), then some growing calls for reinstating school mask mandates or other inappropriate restrictions should be dropped.
For over a year, it has been apparent that many hospitalizations officially classified as being due to COVID-19 are instead of patients without COVID symptoms who are admitted for other reasons but also happen to test positive. Since nearly everyone is still routinely swabbed upon hospital admission (although the largest infection control organization has recommended against doing so), many patients with other conditions also receive a positive test result, especially during the ongoing Omicron surges — thereby overstating the number of hospitalizations tabulated as caused by COVID-19. UCLA researchers who examined Los Angeles County Public Hospital data discovered that over two-thirds of official COVID-19 hospitalizationssince January 2022 were actually “with” rather than “for” the disease.
A rigorous Massachusetts assessment determined that a comparable proportion of COVID hospitalizations were in fact incidental to the coronavirus. An attending physician at Emory Decatur Hospital (and former president of Georgia’s chapter of the Infectious Diseases Society) cited by Dr. Wen estimates that some 90% of patients diagnosed with COVID at his hospital are now instead being treated for another illness. Wen also quoted Tufts Hospital’s epidemiologist, who similarly observes that recently the proportion of patients hospitalized for COVID-19 has been as low as 10% of the number reportedly having the disease. All this is fully consistent with the reality that by March 2022 over 95% of people had already been infected or vaccinated or typically both, and the resulting robust population immunity combined with the less virulent nature of Omicron results in far fewer severe outcomes.