The Washington Post columnist and CNN medical analyst Dr. Leana Wen once demanded that rights and privileges enjoyed by Americans be explicitly tied to getting the covid vaccine during the mandate push to autumn 2021.
The last time we checked in with the former covid-absolutist, she expressed regrets after constant masking hindered her son’s language development. She then embraced the idea I have championed since February 2020: Personal risk assessment.
Wen wrote in The Washington Post that we are overcounting covid deaths and hospitalizations.
Two infectious-disease experts I spoke with believe that the number of deaths attributed to covid is far greater than the actual number of people dying from covid. 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.“Since every hospitalized patient gets tested for covid, many are incidentally positive,” he said. A gunshot victim or someone who had a heart attack, for example, could test positive for the virus, but the infection has no bearing on why they sought medical care.
This opinion aligns with other infectious disease experts, medical professionals, and epidemiologists. Unfortunately, as demonstrated in the #TwitterFiles, voices that challenged the covid narrative were silenced at the behest of the White House, bureaucrats, and politicians.
Wen interviewed Robin Dretler, an attending physician at Emory Decatur Hospital and the former president of Georgia’s chapter of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, who estimated that at his hospital, 90 percent of patients diagnosed with covid are in the hospital for some cause.
She also spoke with infectious disease physician Dr. Shira Doron. She and her colleagues have found that using the steroid dexamethasone, a standard treatment for covid patients with low oxygen levels, was a good proxy measure for hospitalizations due to the coronavirus when evaluating records.
The physicians are pressing for more accurate numbers, so a proper assessment can be made of the current level of risk.
Both Dretler and Doron have faced criticism from people who say they are minimizing covid. That is not at all their aim. They have taken care of covid patients throughout the pandemic and have seen the evolution of the disease. Earlier on, covid pneumonia often killed otherwise healthy people.Today, most patients in their hospitals carrying the coronavirus are there for another reason. They want the public to see what they’re seeing, because, as Doron says, “overcounting covid deaths undermines people’s sense of security and the efficacy of vaccines.”…Most importantly, knowing 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.
In other news related to the covid studies and media attention, there is a push to make “long covid” the next scary thing, as many people have recovered from at least one bout with the disease.
There is some good news from an Israeli study, which found that most people who contracted a mild COVID-19 saw their long-term symptoms resolve within the first year.
Some of the common symptoms include brain fog, loss of smell and taste, breathing problems, dizziness and weakness, heart palpitations, and strep throat.Researchers found most of those problems went away after 12 months, but some doctors said they’re still seeing long-term covid symptoms in their patients.
Hopefully, news of the Israeli study and others supporting a more reasoned assessment of covid risks will no longer be suppressed on social media or Twitter.
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