My sister spent time in the emergency room yesterday. We spent a lot of time talking to our nurse.
She told us that during the pandemic, she’d personally seen examples of people dying in car accidents and then being posthumously tested for covid, and if they were positive, they would be listed as dying of covid so the hospitals could get additional disaster relief funding.
I find this claim to be highly dubious, because on the same visit, I told her I don’t feel safe in Trump’s America, and she said she feels safer than she did the last four years. So we stopped talking politics, but she’s clearly a Trump supporter, and therefore I don’t fully trust her judgement.
So, what’s the Straight Dope? Did hospitals deliberately play with the covid numbers?
I would imagine that it probably did happen in some hospitals, but I also doubt it was anything coordinated or systematic at any level beyond that.
What I do think was probably common was that anyone who tested positive probably got COVID listed as a contributing cause of death on their death certificate if it was in any way related. Doesn’t mean they’re listed as “having died from COVID”, but rather that it was a secondary cause of death or contributing condition. For example, someone who died of a heart attack might have that listed as the primary cause of death, but the secondary cause of death/contributing condition would be something like congestive heart failure or diabetes.
Now I doubt they were listing COVID as a contributing cause of death on things like vehicle accidents- that’s stretching credibility pretty far.
As far as your sister is concerned, her contention sounds much more like a conspiracy theory than it does a legitimate thing. I can totally hear the way that those things go- it’s super-sekrit knowledge that they know, but that is covered up, right?
In a country of 250 million people, on a planet of 8 billion people, it is impossible to accurately say that such-and-such a thing never happened anywhere.
That said, this nurse is lying. 100%. She also has no idea about the mechanisms by which her hospital did or did not receive financial support during the crisis. She is parroting Republican party lies, and thinks that being an employee of a hospital gives her the authority to validate those otherwise unsupported positions.