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Report: 94 percent of COVID-19 patients who died had underlying conditions

2020-08-31 | 🔗
Fox news medical contributor Dr. Nicole Saphier weighs in.
This is an unofficial transcript meant for reference. Accuracy is not guaranteed.
Over to you, Steve Steve, all right Emily. Thank you very much. Well, you may have seen the headlines this weekend questioning reports about the new centers for Disease Control Data, revealing that ninety four percent of people who have died from Covid had something else going on with them here to set the record Straight Fox NEWS, medical contributor and author of Make America healthy again, Dr Nicole Saphier, Dr Saphier, good Monday morning to you good good morning, Steve Steve. I saw this everywhere this story about how of the people who have died of covid only six percent died of covid. Ninety four percent died of the flu diabetes heart stuff things like that, so it makes it sound as if Covid not that bad. We called new to set the record straight well, thats, Right Steve. Over over the weekend, you saw a lot of reports going down that the CDC has updated over the one hundred and sixty thousand Americans who have died,
saying that only six percent of them had covid only listed as death, but the truth is Steve. A lot of them had underlying co, morbidities or just contributing causes of their death. That doesnt necessarily mean they are RON Nic illnesses. Forty three percent of them were pneumonia. Forty seven percent of them were listed as acute respiratory failure, not lung disease, but acute respiratory failure. Think of breast cancer. My specialty forty two percent of people who die from breast cancer die from some sort of organ failure. Twenty four percent die from some form of respiratory failure, but those are directly caused by the cancer or treatment themselves, meaning they wouldnt have died from those causes had they not had the cancer thats the same with a lot of these listed deaths, they wouldnt have died from that acute respiratory failure or sepsis, or some of the other causes. If they didnt have covid covid. That virus is what is actually causing those diseases
causing them to die. Yes, they also listed obesity, diabetes and alzheimers in some of the patients, but we know that we know people who have chronic medical conditions are not fairing as well with this virus, just like they dont farewell in general, when theyre hospitalized with anything thats. Why we have to live our healthiest lives, but again, this report tells us that there are a plethora causes of people dying from Covid 19, but the majority of them are direct damage to the body from the virus. Remember we talked about that storm. It effects the lungs. It effects the heart; it can effect the kidneys and brain thats why you are seeing these other disease states listed on causes of death, that is responsible reporting of causes of death, Steve. Okay, thank you very much for making that very, very easy to understand. There was a story, meanwhile, from the New York Times talking about how your coronavirus test is positive, and maybe it
shouldnt be, and essentially what it said is because millions of people are getting these tests and they come back positive. In some cases, the viral load, the amount of covid in the persons body is so insignificant. They are likely not as contagious thats. The way I read it is that about what the story was trying to say right, well, Steve, so something that I have been saying for a long time is we keep seeing a lot of positive cases, whats the clinical significance of those positive cases right now. The stark for detecting the virus is a nasal swab PRC test that looks for genetic material, that genetic material in the nose doesnt equate to someone having enough virus to be contagious or having the infection themselves. What we need to do is we dont want to get away from test people. We need to change our mind, set of you who we test, people thats, why these rapid test are going to be crucial moving
forward when it comes to testing for Covid 19, because, yes, we cannot treat every person that is positive, meaning that they are going to be highly con teenage jus, because the truth is most people arent, infectious or contagious for that full fourteen days, they may actually only be contagious for three to seven of those days thats the time that we really want to make sure they are self isolating. We need to get people back to work. We need to get people back to school, sometimes waiting for those long PRC tests to go back to negative may not be realistic and may not be necessary, so the Trump Administration just vowed to secure one hundred and fifty million of the Abbott Rapid test. Those rapid tests are a better chance at determining who is going to be contagious and not contagious, but we want to make sure that we are able to do those rapid tests and not just the symptomatic people, but also asymptomatic people, but we have to remember asymptomatic. I can people can spread this viral infection Steve there. You go the story behind the headlines once again, Dr Saphier. We know so much
more now about this thing than we did in March. Its great to have you stop by to try to explain what it all.
Transcript generated on 2020-08-31.