The president’s comments at a recent rally are false and contribute to the spread of misinformation, they say.
Hospital groups are pushing back against President Trump’s claims this week that doctors are over-reporting COVID-19 deaths for financial gain. Trump made the comments at a Wisconsin rally on Saturday.
“You know some countries they report differently,” Trump is quoted as saying in Newsweek. “If somebody’s sick with a heart problem, and they die of COVID they say they die of a heart problem. If somebody’s terminally ill with cancer and they have COVID, we report them. And you know doctors get more money and hospitals get more money. Think of this incentive. … We’re going to start looking at things.”
WHAT’S THE IMPACT
Hospitals and health systems are eligible to receive higher payments for complex coronavirus-related treatment under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, under which they receive a Medicare add-on payment of 20%. However, American Hospital Association President and CEO Rick Pollack refuted Trump’s claims.
Asked to respond, the AHA referred to a viewpoint article written by Pollack in September, in which he sought to dispel what he called certain “myths.”
“Hospitals do not receive extra funds when patients die from COVID-19,” Pollack said. “They are not over-reporting COVID-19 cases. And they are not making money on treating COVID-19.
“The truth is,hospitals and health systems are in their worst financial shape in decades due to the coronavirus. In some cases, the situation is truly dire. An AHA report estimates total losses for our nation’s hospitals and health systems of least $323 billion in 2020. There is no windfall here.”
Pollack also noted that healthcare organizations adhere to strict coding guidelines and use the COVID-19 code for Medicare claims only for confirmed cases. Inappropriate coding can result in criminal penalties and exclusion from the Medicare program altogether.
In a more recent and direct response to the president’s latest comments, American Medical Association President Dr. Susan Bailey bemoaned that physicians are being pulled into a public battle over the legitimacy and motivation behind their work.
“The assault on public health and the undermining of efforts to defeat COVID-19 began with unfounded suspicions about the science and evidence of this novel coronavirus and how it spreads,” Bailey said on Tuesday. “It grew with speculation about harmful and unproven treatments for COVID-19, false claims that masks were a source of infections, and by misleading suggestions that increased testing alone explains why case counts are surging.
“It expanded again with inaccurate, dangerous statements about children being ‘almost immune’ from the most serious effects of COVID-19, a reckless plan of ‘focused protection’ and naturally acquired ‘herd immunity’ as a pathway out of this pandemic, and most recently with wild and highly offensive claims that physicians are inflating the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths to increase our incomes.”
Bailey said that many public health officials have been threatened and intimidated, prompting some to quit or retire, and decried the “campaign of misinformation” as a betrayal of public trust that threatens the work being done to treat and contain the virus.
“Our AMA will always stand on the side of patients and physicians, of science and evidence, and of free and honest conversations that build the trust that is so crucial to our work,” she said. “We will not hesitate to call out political intimidation and fear-driven rhetoric that undermines this trust or that interferes with our ability to deliver the very best care to patients.”
The American College of Emergency Physicians also issued a statement, calling Trump’s assertions “reckless” and “false.”
“To imply that emergency physicians would inflate the number of deaths from this pandemic to gain financially is offensive, especially as many are actually under unprecedented financial strain as they continue to bear the brunt of COVID-19,” ACEP wrote. “These baseless claims not only do a disservice to our health care heroes but promulgate the dangerous wave of misinformation which continues to hinder our nation’s efforts to get the pandemic under control and allow our nation to return to normalcy.”
THE LARGER TREND
The numbers of COVID-19 cases continue to bring grim news, especially in the U.S., which struggled early in the pandemic to secure testing capacity and necessary personal protective equipment for frontline healthcare workers.
As of Wednesday morning, the Johns Hopkins University coronavirus tracker showed more than 8.7 million confirmed cases of the virus in the U.S., with the death toll climbing to over 226,000. Both lead the world. Second on the list is India (7,990,322 cases, 120,010 deaths), while Brazil comes in third (5,439,641 cases, 157,946 deaths).
Dr. Anthony Fauci on Thursday denounced the concept of herd immunity — the notion that if a large enough group of people contract an infection, it will ultimately stop the disease from spreading — calling it “nonsense” during an interview with Yahoo News.
“Anybody who knows anything about epidemiology will tell you that is nonsense and very dangerous,” Fauci said, “because what will happen is that if you do that, by the time you get to herd immunity, you will have killed a lot of people that would have been avoidable.”
Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and member of the White House coronavirus task force, discussed the coronavirus pandemic and the country’s response to it during a live interview Thursday morning with Yahoo News Editor in Chief Daniel Klaidman and Chief Investigative Correspondent Michael Isikoff.
The coronavirus has killed more than 216,000 people in the U.S. and infected almost 8 million, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
Now, more than seven months after the coronavirus was declared a pandemic, Fauci said Thursday that the U.S. is not in a good place.
“We talk about a second wave,” he said. “We’ve never really gotten out of the first wave. If you look at the baseline number of daily infections that we have had over the last several weeks, [it’s] been around 40,000 per day. It’s now gone up to about 50,000 per day. So right away, we have a very unfortunate baseline from which we need to deal.”
President Trump and his administration have been pushing the herd immunity approach as a possible solution to ending the pandemic, the New York Times reported Wednesday. During a call with reporters, two officials who requested anonymity cited a petition called the Great Barrington Declaration, which calls for states to lift coronavirus restrictions for the bulk of American citizens, the Times reported.
When asked about the herd immunity approach, Fauci said that while he agrees with what the declaration says about protecting the vulnerable and not closing down the country, virtually anyone with a solid understanding of epidemiology would disagree with the idea of letting everyone get infected.
“My position is known. Dr. Deborah Birx’s position is known, and Dr. [Robert] Redfield,” he said. “So you have me as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Debbie Birx, as the coordinator and a very experienced infectious disease person, the coordinator of the task force — and you have Bob Redfield, who’s the director of the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention]. All three of us very clearly are against that.”
The White House is reportedly embracing a herd-immunity approach focused on “protecting the elderly and the vulnerable” but experts are calling the plan dangerous, “unethical”, and equivalent to “mass murder”.
“Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health,” the declaration states, adding, “The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.”
Essentially, herd immunity is when enough people are immune to a disease, like Covid-19, that the disease can’t be transmitted as easily and thus provides indirect protection.
It’s been rumoured that the government has been leaning towards this plan of action for some time now, although this is the first real admission.
In response to today’s news, experts around the world have been voicing their concerns.
And this isn’t the first time we’ve heard experts say herd immunity is not a good idea.
For example, the head of the World Health Organization said Monday that allowing the novel coronavirus to spread in an attempt to reach herd immunity was “simply unethical.”
Similarly, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Francis Collins also denounced herd immunity as a viable plan.
“What I worry about with this is it’s being presented as if it’s a major alternative view that’s held by large numbers of experts in the scientific community. That is not true. This is a fringe component of epidemiology. This is not mainstream science. It fits into the political views of certain parts of our confused political establishment,” he said in an interview.
Not to mention studies continue to show that Sweden’s attempts at herd immunity have failed and have resulted in a higher Covid-19 death toll than expected.
As more research comes out, scientists are starting to learn that Covid-19 immunity, even in those who were severely infected, can fade after a few weeks.
This is why we’ve seen cases of reinfection and why many experts are advising against a herd immunity plan.
To put that into context, that means around 197 million people would need to be infected in America. And assuming that the Covid-19 fatality rate is somewhere between 0.5% and 1%, based on numbers from the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 1 million people would die – at minimum.
William Haseltine, Chair and President of ACCESS Health International, told CNN “herd immunity is another word for mass murder. We are looking at two to six million Americans dead – not just this year but every year.”
“This is an unmitigated disaster for our country – to have people at the highest levels of our government countermanding our best public health officials. We know this epidemic can be put under control. Other countries have done it. We are doing the opposite.”
Although other wealthy countries have higher overall coronavirus mortality rates than the United States, the U.S. death rate since May is unrivaled among its peers, according to a new study published in JAMA.
Between the lines:After the first brutal wave of outbreaks, other countries did much better than the U.S. at learning from their mistakes and preventing more of their population from dying.
Why it matters:“If the U.S. had comparable death rates with most high-mortality countries beginning May 10, it would have had 44,210 to 104,177 fewer deaths,” the authors conclude.
Excess deaths have followed a similar pattern: The hardest-hit European countries had similar or higher rates of excess deaths of all causes to the U.S. early on, but these fell much lower than the America did after the first wave.
Yes, but: Death rates are not static, as this study proves, and outbreaks in several European countries have taken a turn for the worse lately.
HENRY KOTULA 