Four things to know:
1. The CDC’s weekly update last week listed the comorbidities that contribute to COVID-19 death rates, including pneumonia, influenza, hypertension and diabetes. The CDC’s weekly report said 6 percent of individuals had COVID-19 listed as the only cause of death while 94 percent had comorbidities also listed as contributing to their deaths.
2. The social media posts on Twitter stated that just 6 percent of the COVID-19 deaths were “real,” suggesting the comorbidities and not the virus caused the remaining 94 percent of deaths. President Donald Trump retweeted one of those posts, which has since been removed from the platform.
3. Robert Anderson, MD, the official overseeing the CDC’s death statistics work, issued a statement to CNBC that COVID-19 is listed as the underlying cause of death in 92 percent of the deaths.
4. Anthony Fauci, MD, White House advisor and infectious disease expert, addressed the confusion on Good Morning America. “It’s not 9,000 deaths from COVID-19. It’s 180,000-plus deaths,” he said. “The point that the CDC was trying to make was that a certain percentage of [deaths] had nothing else but COVID. That does not mean that someone who has hypertension, or diabetes, who dies of COVID didn’t die of COVID-19. They did.”
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