Biden administration try to separate COVID hospitalizations from people who test positive but are in hospital for other reasons

According to two senior officials who spoke to Politico, the Biden administration has formed a task force comprised of data specialists from the Department of Health and Human Services and the CDC to work with hospitals and improve their COVID-19 reporting. The group is asking on hospitals to report the numbers of patients who go to the facility because they have COVID-19 and separate them from those who go in for other reasons but test positive from the virus.

The goal is to create a “more accurate sense” of the virus’ impact around the country and whether it is causing severe disease – or not. Biden officials have increasingly relied on hospital numbers and not raw case counts to determine how to respond to the virus and test the efficacy of the vaccines, Politico reported.

In a CDC report published last week, a California hospital discovered 80% of its patients came into the facility for COVID-19 and 20 percent were admitted “primarily for non–COVID-19 conditions.”

“Lower hospitalization rates could inform the administration’s thinking on public health measures such as masking. More accurate Covid-19 numbers also could provide a better picture of the strain on hospitals and which resources they might need during surges,” the publication reported.

“You need a panel of experts to review the cases to adjudicate if a hospitalization is for a person who came in for Covid or with Covid,” said Eric Topol, a professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research and a former advisory board member of the Covid Tracking Project. “It's not something that is coded in the chart. A lot of people will say an individual came in with Covid, but it was actually the Covid that exacerbated the lung or heart disease.”

Under former President Donald Trump, the administration launched a similar effort to differentiate COVID numbers from those simply diagnosed with it but who are in hospitals for other reasons. However, hospitals did not consistently maintain the process – so people who arrived in hospital for a broken leg or a car crash but tested positive for COVID were logged in as COVID hospitalizations.