“I blew my lid,” Auld says - but she vented only to her husband. Just recently, Auld says, she got an email from a relative “informing me that COVID death numbers were grossly exaggerated - that the CDC had intervened” to increase the totals.
Still, people wonder: What determines if COVID-19 played that role? Many people still doubt the official totals, with some claiming they’re inflated as part of a conspiracy. Federal and state governments gradually altered such policies over the spring and summer to say that in order for a death to be counted as a COVID-19 death, the disease had to have played a role. That statement, combined with some state health officials saying they follow the same policy, sparked charges that the COVID-19 totals were inflated by deaths from other diseases and even auto accidents if the victims happened to have COVID-19. Last April, Deborah Birx, MD, coordinator of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, said this when asked about people who have COVID-19 but die from preexisting conditions: “If someone dies with COVID-19, we are counting that as a COVID-19 death.” The official government figure - nearly a half-million as of mid-February - has spurred not only public health measures to battle the disease but also confusion and doubts based on a fundamental question: What defines a COVID-19 death?Įarly in the pandemic, some of the answers provided by public officials - who were scrambling to track the disease as it overwhelmed health systems - fed skepticism. Such decisions, made every day by doctors in hospitals around the country, are the unseen yet predominant sources for the nation’s most watched and scrutinized health statistic: people who have died from COVID-19. Yes, Auld says: “While he was very weak and frail from his underlying cancer, his death was undoubtedly accelerated and precipitated by COVID-19.” “Given his already fragile state, his condition quickly took a turn for the worse” and he died, she recalls. He was admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) and intubated. The man had contracted COVID-19 and was struggling to breathe, recalls Sara Auld, MD, a critical care physician at the hospital. Staffers at Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York, transport a deceased patient to a refrigerated truck that the center had to use for the bodies of COVID-19 victims during a surge in the spring of 2020.Īn elderly man arrived at Atlanta’s Emory University Hospital Midtown last month so stricken with advanced cancer that it could take his life within months - but that’s not what brought him to the emergency room.
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