Dr. Leana Wen writes that COVID deaths are being overcounted

CNN medical analyst and Washington Post columnist Dr. Leana Wen admitted in a column, Friday, that the medical community is “overcounting” the amount of “COVID deaths and hospitalizations.”

Wen, who writes an occasional Washington Post column providing her observations on the pandemic, masking and other COVID-related subjects, cited sources claiming that most “patients diagnosed with COVID are actually in the hospital for some other illness.”

The article is titled, “We are overcounting COVID deaths and hospitalizations. That’s a problem.” 

Wen’s observations prompted readers on Twitter to complain, stating that it’s “two and a half years late.”

Wen began her column with some apparent skepticism about the CDC’s latest COVID-19 death stats: “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?”

The doctor claimed that “Understanding this distinction is crucial to putting the continuing toll of the coronavirus into perspective. Determining how likely it is an infection will result in hospitalization or death helps people weigh their own risk.”

She spoke to two Infectious-disease experts, who told her they believed “the number of deaths attributed to COVID is far greater than the actual number of people dying from COVID.”

Mentioning the first, she wrote, “Robin Dretler, an attending physician at Emory Decatur Hospital and the former president of Georgia’s chapter of Infectious Diseases Society of America, estimates that at his hospital, 90 percent of patients diagnosed with COVID are actually in the hospital for some other illness.”

Dretler told the analyst, “Since every hospitalized patient gets tested for COVID many are incidentally positive.” Wen noted how people with gunshot wounds or other serious illnesses often test positive for the virus, and wrote, “If these patients die, COVID might get added to their death certificate along with the other diagnoses. But the coronavirus was not the primary contributor to their death and often played no role at all.”

Dretler admitted this contributed to “imprecise reporting” on COVID deaths and hospitalizations, which he added did not come from a place of “bad intent.” He denied that there was any “conspiracy” behind it to “exaggerate coronavirus numbers for some nefarious purpose.”

Wen also cited infectious-disease physician Shira Doron, who figured out that “In recent months, only about 30 percent of total hospitalizations with COVID were primarily attributed to the virus” in Massachusetts hospitals for example. 

Wen recounted Doron’s experience at Tufts Medical Center, writing, “During some days, she said, the proportion of those hospitalized because of COVID were as low as 10 percent of the total number reported” who had COVID.