8 facts about the coronavirus to combat common misinformation - The Washington Post

Dec 04, 2020

Faced with a deluge of claims about the coronavirus and the illness it causes, covid-19, you may be wondering whether gargling with saltwater is a cure or if the pathogen was man-made in a Chinese laboratory.

Part of the confusion about face coverings seems to have come from President Trump’s false claim in October that 85 percent of people diagnosed with covid-19 wore masks — a mischaracterization of a CDC study.

As The Washington Post’s Fact Checker explained, that study compared groups of people who had tested positive and negative for the coronavirus and found that a much higher percentage of the positive cases had had close contact with someone known to have covid-19.

In the 14 days before they got sick, the study says, 71 percent of positive cases and 74 percent of the negatives reported “always” wearing a mask in public.

Those numbers are almost the same, with the main difference between the groups being that a higher percentage of the positive cases had contact with an infected person.

The Cares Act did include a provision to reimburse hospitals more for uninsured coronavirus patients and those with Medicare, but there is no evidence that hospitals are gaming the system.

In part because Congress knew that Medicare reimbursement rates are far lower than those of private insurers, the Cares Act provided an additional 20 percent reimbursement for hospitals on top of Medicare’s normal rate for a coronavirus patient.

In reality, hospitals are probably losing money on covid-19 patients because the illness is difficult to treat and many hospitals have been overwhelmed by a surge of people needing care.

About 2 percent of diagnosed coronavirus cases are lethal, compared with 0.1 percent of diagnosed flu cases.

For both illnesses, experts believe that far more people are infected than receive official diagnoses — meaning the true death rates are probably much lower.

The CDC estimates that, including people who have been infected with the coronavirus but didn’t know it, the U.S.

There’s also no truth to the idea that doctors are inflating the coronavirus death toll by indiscriminately attributing deaths to covid-19.

They also look at whether underlying conditions, which exist in most people who die of covid-19, contributed to the death.

The official coronavirus death toll includes those fatalities because covid-19 spurred the other health issues that killed the patient.

While many younger people may have asymptomatic or mild cases of covid-19, the illness can be serious for others.

And while people with underlying conditions are much more likely to be hospitalized or die, CDC figures from June show that 7.6 percent of patients without underlying conditions were hospitalized.

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