(Time Magazine) Check the COVID-19 Data Tracker from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and you’ll get a rundown of the latest case numbers, hospitalizations, and deaths. Those categories might seem straightforward, but the data, say many experts, are telling us a lot less than we think they are.
That’s because it’s getting increasingly difficult to parse who is hospitalized or dies from COVID-19, and who is hospitalized or dies from another reason but with COVID-19. Across the U.S., “COVID-19 hospitalizations” represent all kinds of patients: those who need hospital-level care for severe cases of COVID-19; those with risk factors like heart disease or kidney issues who got infected, then had a heart attack, stroke, or kidney failure and needed to be hospitalized; and those who were admitted for one health condition but tested positive for COVID-19 at some point during their stay or several weeks afterward. COVID-19 plays a role of varying importance in all of these hospitalizations. “The situation is murky because we don’t know if COVID-19 is to blame for their worsening chronic health, or whether they developed a COVID-19 opportunistic infection that is [having] more of a bystander effect,” says Dr. Susan Cheng, professor of cardiology and director of public health research at Cedars-Sinai. “It’s hard to parse these things out except in the most extremely obvious cases.”