Take note: the coronavirus narrative is shifting again.
Following the lead of Dr. Anthony Fauci, a second liberal state has now signaled that it will begin counting COVID-19 hospitalizations differently.
According to Breitbart News, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health announced last week that it will begin differentiating whether a COVID-related hospitalization is “primary or incidental” to the virus.
In other words, the new system will designate whether the patient is in a hospital bed “for” COVID-19 or “with” COVID-19.
The change is supposed to take effect this week. Last week, Massachusetts reported having hospitalized more than 2,400 COVID-positive patients, which was a number matching the peak of a year ago.
As Masslive.com reported on Friday, “The update could provide the public with a clearer sense of the severity of the omicron variant and how the record high numbers of new cases correlate to severe illness that requires hospitalization.”
The outlet noted that Republican Gov. Charlie Baker pondered this issue back in October 2020, saying, “When you call the hospitals and you talk to them one at a time, or the systems, a significant number of the people who they — who we — count as COVID positive are not in the hospital because they have COVID. They’re in the hospital for some other purpose and they got tested positive when they came in.”
Breitbart noted that New York Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul also made the same decision last week.
At a press conference last Monday, Hochul said, “Hospitalizations continue to rise. That is a trend that is, again, troubling.”
But, she added, “I have always wondered, we’re looking at the hospitalizations of people testing positive in a hospital. Is that person in the hospital because of COVID or did they show up there and are routinely tested and showing positive and they may have been asymptomatic or even just had the sniffles. Someone is in a car accident, they go to the emergency room, they test positive for COVID while they’re there. They’re not there being treated for COVID.”
“We don’t have clear data right now,” Hochul continued. “Beginning tomorrow, we’re going to be asking all hospitals to break out for us. How many people are being hospitalized because of COVID symptoms? How many people are happened to be testing positive just while they’re in there for other treatments.”
“I think that’s important. I just want to always be honest with New Yorkers about how bad this is. Yes, the sheer numbers of people infected are high, but I want to see whether or not the hospitalizations correlate with that.”
Both New York and Massachusetts announced their new way of calculating COVID hospital stays a week after Dr. Anthopny Fauci raised the issue about children being hospitalized – and as some in the liberal media have been making the case that hospitalizations are a better, real-time metric than cases or deaths for determining COVID’s risk.
During an MSNBC interview, Fauci said, “The other important thing is that if you look at the children who are hospitalized, many of them are hospitalized with COVID as opposed to because of COVID.”
“And what we mean by that — if a child goes in the hospital, they automatically get tested for COVID. And they get counted as a COVID-hospitalized individual. When in fact, they may go in for a broken leg or appendicitis or something like that. So it’s overcounting the number of children who are, quote, ‘hospitalized with COVID,’ as opposed to because of COVID.”
The question, though, may be: If elected politicians like Govs. Baker and Hochul have been thinking about this issue for at least 15 months, why did it take so long to make this change?
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