No, Hospitals Are Not Inflating Covid-19 Cases
President Trump promotes a bogus, offensive, dangerous conspiracy theory, the doctors say
On a weekend when hospitals in Utah prepare to ration care amid a flood of Covid-19 patients in their ICUs as the coronavirus surges around the country and deaths are on the rise again, President Donald Trump claimed during a political rally that doctors and hospitals are inflating the number of Covid-19 deaths in order to get more money. It’s a conspiracy theory that’s been roundly debunked before, but the promotion of it by the president has doctors and other front-line medical workers angry and exasperated, atop their exhaustion in the face of the neverending pandemic that oh, by the way, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows now says “we’re not going to control.”
“President Trump’s baseless claims about physicians overcounting COVID-19 deaths is harmful and offensive,” tweeted Craig Spencer, MD, director of global health in emergency medicine at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center. Spencer has been on the front lines treating Covid patients since February. “For healthcare workers, it’s really exhausting to have a president constantly working against us — instead of with us — in the middle of a pandemic.”
