President Donald Trump and members of his coronavirus task force are pushing officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to change how the agency works with states to count coronavirus-related deaths. And they’re pushing for revisions that could lead to far fewer deaths being counted
than originally reported, according to five administration officials working on the government’s response to the pandemic.
Officials inside the CDC, five of whom spoke to The Daily Beast, said they are pushing back against that request, claiming it could falsely skew the mortality rate at a time when state and local governments are already struggling to ensure that every person who dies as a result of the coronavirus is counted. Scientists and doctors working with the task force, including Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, have said the U.S.
That official called the mortality rate a “far-lagging indicator” of the spread of the virus and argued that it was “not a real-time indicator of how the virus is affecting the population.” The official said it was the task force’s view that the mortality rate doesn’t “inform the response efforts as other data could, like hospitalizations” and that the virus moves through populations “like nursing homes and prisons,” as well as populations with comorbidities.
But according to one of the sources with knowledge of Trump’s private remarks, the president recently said that he’d like a “review” of how the coronavirus deaths are counted and studied by the government, citing hypothetical cases in which a person has the virus but is killed by other unnatural means, such as falling down a flight of stairs.
Anderson said the death count is normally higher from states’ health systems than the death certificate system data. “But those numbers aren’t necessarily inconsistent,” he said, adding that the death-certificate death count usually lags anywhere from two to eight weeks. Meanwhile, local officials and doctors say any disruption in the way they count coronavirus deaths could lead to a significant undercounting.
Even with the death-certificate coding system, doctors and local officials say they are running into problems where some of their patients are not being counted in the total coronavirus death tally.
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