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.
HOST: Another example that has confused people in the past: someone is in a car crash and maybe the victim had COVID or develops COVID, and people get confused – how can COVID be responsible for somebody who’s been injured in a car crash? What will you tell folks who are confused about that?
ROBERT ANDERSON: Well it really depends on the circumstances. In cases where the death is clearly the result of trauma caused by the crash, whether the decedent had COVID-19 or not should be irrelevant. COVID-19 is not a factor in those cases. Now, in these cases it should not be counted as COVID-19 deaths – because the trauma caused the death, not any sort of viral infection that person might have had. However, we do know of cases where people have been hospitalized with serious but not life-threatening trauma from a car crash, who contracted COVID-19 in the hospital and then subsequently died as result of COVID-19. So in a case like that the crash and the trauma might be a contributing factor, but the underlying cause was COVID-19. So that was the primary cause of death because that’s what caused them to die when they died – it wasn’t the trauma. So it’s complicated and it does depend on the circumstances.
Other sources also said this.
one argument we saw time and time was that the COVID-19 death numbers were inflated, and that if someone dies in a car accident, they’re counted as a COVID death.
That’s exactly the kind of belief that Verify exists to get to the bottom of. So we got the facts from the people in charge of the data.
QUESTION:
Are people who have died in car accidents counted as COVID-19 deaths?
ANSWER:
No. There is a two-level system in place to make sure death counts are accurate.
The Verify team found a case in which someone’s death after a motor vehicle accident was inaccurately attributed to COVID-19. But that case has since been fixed.
Sally Aiken, the president of the National Association of Medical Examiners, called the allegation “ridiculous.”
Not in the UK either.
Even if in an unusual case a death certificate mentioned both COVID-19 and a traffic accident (or other external causes), the World Health Organisation (WHO) rules for coding deaths mean that the traffic accident would be identified as the underlying cause of death in our data.
So, no, no, no, and no. Also see pages of no’s on Google.
Did anyone in the government spread this preposterous claim to make it authoritative? Trump, of course.
In the waning days of the campaign, President Donald Trump complained repeatedly about how the United States tracks the number of people who have died from COVID-19, claiming, “This country and its reporting systems are just not doing it right.”
He went on to blame those reporting systems for inflating the number of deaths, pointing a finger at medical professionals, who he said benefit financially.
Initially everyone who died with covid was recorded as such. There wasn’t enough manpower to go through every medical record as each death occurred - people were dying in too large of numbers. So the presence of covid was noted.
Then as time allowed, the records were gone through and the ones who died of another cause were corrected - usually within a couple weeks. In my state, the National Guard was used to help with the backlog.
I have actually reported a med tech person for telling me ‘ you didn’t need to mask”. That it was all a bunch of lies.
She disappeared from my dialysis clinic. To spread her CTs elsewhere, I assume.
‘Cause they are everywhere you just gotta walk-on.
It’s not like trying to convince someone of the error of their ways and beliefs while they may be attending to your medical needs is not gonna be, in you, the patients, best interest.
It’s also important to understand the death certificates can list multiple causes of death. My mom’s listed 4, i think. Off the top of my head: covid, myasthenia gravis, kidney disease, and maybe dementia.
The proximate cause is death was covid. But she probably wouldn’t have died of covid if her immune system hadn’t been destroyed by the treatment for her myasthenia. And the kidney disease and dementia made the covid more deadly, as well. Further, without the dementia, she probably wouldn’t have needed the live-in aid who have her covid. She also had very high blood pressure, which might or might not have made it to the death certificate.
Anyway, i think the average number of causes of death is about 2, because many people who die are old and have many things wrong with them.
Also, there are always data errors. My father’s death certificate says “heart attack” but an autopsy showed it was a pulmonary embolism that killed him. My husband’s uncle’s death certificate says “heart attack”, too, because he was an old guy who died alone with no sign of foul play. But his heart was in excellent shape, and he probably died from a giant gall stone. (He had a lot of physical problems in parts other than his heart. It might not have been a gallstone, although he was prone to enormous spikey gallstones and he avoided doctors. But it’s unlikely that his heart was the cause of death, that’s just an easy thing for the police to jot down after breaking down the door and finding an old guy who’s been dead a couple days.) And then there are just errors. Transcription errors, people mishearing things, … Any large body of data is going to have some significant errors in it.
But the official US covid deaths tracked reasonably well with the excess mortality. There wasn’t any widespread miscoding.
I’m far from an expert, but it seems to me that the COVID funding should be directed to hospitals based on how many cases there are in the area served by the hospital, regardless of whether or not the patient died of COVID, died of some unrelated cause, or didn’t die at all. Some guy comes into the ER from a car accident and is declared DOA. Whether or not that guy had COVID is still relevant to determining how much COVID that hospital is going to be dealing with, and how much money they need to handle that case load.
There was an extra death benefit you could apply for if covid was on the death certificate. (Although we never got around to applying…) There may well have been extra funds for covid cases in hospitals.
Sure, and that would be some species of fraud. But just noting, “This is how many COVID cases we’ve seen, and that means we need X dollars to deal with it,” would still legitimately include people who had COVID, but died of something unrelated.
It isn’t curious at all that the conspiracy specifically says “car accidents” and every conspiracist claims to have “personally seen examples of people dying in car accidents and then being posthumously tested for covid” but no other, specific, claim of a cause of death that wasn’t a car crash is it?
This sort of thing absolutely pisses me off and @ekedolphin I agree that you should report this.
As an ER nurse that saw lots of dead people during Covid, I never saw this happen. In fact, I’ve never even seen a death certificate in the Emergency Department. I have to admit, I’m not sure where they are generated. We typically noted Time of Death and the proximate cause, I.E., Blunt force trauma secondary to MVC or Respiratory failure secondary to pneumonia. I’ve also never witnessed a person tested for Covid after death, though I can imagine it could happen.