Hochul Orders Hospitals to Correctly Categorize Covid Cases

GOV. KATHY HOCHUL: Beginning tomorrow, we’re going to be asking all hospitals to break out for us how many people are being hospitalized because of covid symptoms, how many people happen to be testing positive just while they’re in there for other treatments. So that’s… Um, I think that’s important. I’m anticipating to see that at least a certain percentage overall are not related to being treated for covid.

BUCK: Oh, I think that’s important too. Welcome back to the Clay and Buck show. Yet again. We need to create, Clay, like some kind of a board, you know, like a bracket for things we have said since June of 2021 —

CLAY: Years.

BUCK: — or we could go back all the way to March of 2020 that we were told and people attacked us for and said, “Oh, my gosh. You’re reckless,” and people are gonna die because of you and grandparents are gonna disappear because of you. And now they just kind of inserted into the conversation, you know, NBD. No big deal. It turns out there are covid cases that are being counted as hospitalization. ‘Cause, remember, the case count is…

That’s why all this testing stuff, it doesn’t really do what they pretend it will, which is to be a tool against the spread. You can have tests in everyone’s home in the country, there’s still gonna be covid bouncing all over the place. But hospitalizations is supposed to be an… It is an important metric. But you gotta get it right. And here’s the governor of New York who wears a vaccine necklace, friends.

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: That’s not an exaggeration, not trying to… She actually has some kind of a vaccine necklace on, and she calls it “a gift from God,” and I’m sure pope Fauci approves of this talk. Clay, she’s now saying what we’ve been saying for many months, which is clearly they are counting hospitalizations that involve people there not for covid, car accident or whatever, who test positive who were a mild case. And even Fauci had to admit this about children. But I haven’t gotten an apology yet. I don’t think you have, either.

CLAY: No. And to your point we’ve been making this argument for a long time, and I don’t always get it right. But when we talk about covid deaths or when we talk about covid hospitalizations, I always try to say “with covid” as opposed to “from” or “because of covid.” That’s a significant difference because even to this point the people dying with covid have three to four additional covid comorbidities.

Ron DeSantis, to his credit, in Florida, they’ve done a good job of pointing out that one reason that covid hospitalization numbers can be high is they test everybody for covid when they come into the hospital. To your point, if you’re going in to have a knee replacement or if you’re having an appendectomy or you’re a mom that might be having a baby, one of the first things they do when you get checked into the hospital is test you for covid.

So I saw the data from Florida recently where they said between 50 and 65% of the people with covid in the hospital are only finding out that they have covid because they’re in the hospital for some other reason and they test and there’s a blood positivity then that they have. So all of a sudden, because the numbers are skyrocketing, and Democrats understand that they now are being held responsible for the covid situation in this country, because they’re in power; they control Congress, they control the White House. Suddenly, Kathy Hochul, the governor of New York, says, “Oh, by the way, let’s make sure that we’re not overreacting or exaggerating what’s going on with covid hospitalizations.” The timing, as always, ridiculous.