The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease Dr. Anthony Fauci is back in the news after the successful surgery to remove a polyp on his vocal cord. In his latest comments on Tueday, Dr. Fauci contracts the newly updated data from CDC that shows just 6% of the 161,392 reported US coronavirus deaths are caused by only COVID-19.
Appearing for the first time after his surgery, Dr. Fauci told the ABC program “Good Morning America” on Tuesday that the CDC guidance, last updated on Aug. 26, indicates that of the people who have died from the virus, “a certain percentage of them had nothing else but just COVID.” However, people with underlying illnesses also die from Covid-19, he added.
It all started this last weekend when the CDC updated its provisional death counts for the reporting period 2/1/2020 through 8/22/2020. According to the stats, the CDC said that 6% of the 153,504 US deaths are related to COVID-19 only. The other 94% had, on average, 2+ pre-existing conditions or causes per death. In other words, 94% of Americans who died from COVID-19 had other “types of health conditions and contributing causes” in addition to the virus.
“That does not mean that someone who has hypertension or diabetes who dies of Covid didn’t die of Covid-19. They did,” Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told the program. “So the numbers you’ve been hearing — there are 180,000-plus deaths — are real deaths from Covid-19. Let (there) not be any confusion about that.”
Dr. Fauci said emphatically:
“It’s not 9,000 deaths from Covid-19, it’s 180-plus-thousand deaths.”
Unfortunately, the CDC did not see it that way. According to the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), there were 161,392 death certificates that listed Covid-19 among the possible causes of death as of Aug. 22. According to the data, about 6% of the certificates that mention COVID-19 list it as the sole cause on the death certificate. The remaining 94% included other causes alongside COVID-19. You can find the detailed data CDC website.
