Dr. Leana Wen slammed after admitting there’s been ‘overcounting’ of COVID deaths: ‘TWO AND A HALF YEARS LATE’

Wen claimed that the actual COVID-19 death count could only be ’30 percent of what’s currently reported’

CNN medical analyst and Washington Post columnist Dr. Leana Wen admitted in a column, Friday, that the medical community is “overcounting” the amount of “COVID deaths and hospitalizations.”

Wen, who writes an occasional Washington Post column providing her observations on the pandemic, masking and other COVID-related subjects, cited sources claiming that most “patients diagnosed with COVID are actually in the hospital for some other illness.”

The article is titled, “We are overcounting COVID deaths and hospitalizations. That’s a problem.”

Wen’s observations prompted readers on Twitter to complain, stating that it’s “two and a half years late.”

… are these Americans dying from COVID or with COVID?”

…she wrote, “Robin Dretler, an attending physician at Emory Decatur Hospital and the former president of Georgia’s chapter of Infectious Diseases Society of America, estimates that at his hospital, 90 percent of patients diagnosed with COVID are actually in the hospital for some other illness.”

Dretler told the analyst, “Since every hospitalized patient gets tested for COVID many are incidentally positive.” Wen noted how people with gunshot wounds or other serious illnesses often test positive for the virus, and wrote, “If these patients die, COVID might get added to their death certificate along with the other diagnoses. But the coronavirus was not the primary contributor to their death and often played no role at all.”

Dretler admitted this contributed to “imprecise reporting” on COVID deaths and hospitalizations, which he added did not come from a place of “bad intent.” He denied that there was any “conspiracy” behind it to “exaggerate coronavirus numbers for some nefarious purpose.”

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