Italian professor of infectious diseases Dr Matteo Bassetti has called for a review of coronavirus deaths in Italy, claiming that people who simply tested positive for the disease have been counted as coronavirus deaths.
Dr Matteo Bassetti, a familiar face to Italians over the course of the pandemic and who is the director of the Infectious Diseases Clinic of the San Martino hospital in Genoa, stated that he wanted to see a review of the number of deaths caused by the Wuhan coronavirus since the start of the pandemic.
“In the form with which the death of a patient is reported, if the doctor writes ‘positive’ to the swab, it is automatically classified as a death occurred from Covid,” Bassetti said during a programme on the Italian television channel La7.
According to a report from the newspaper Il Giornale, Bassetti went on to call for a review of the coronavirus deaths over the last two years saying he wanted to “see how many of those deaths are really related to the virus and how many to other problems.”
Bassetti added that policies for recording admissions to hospitals should be reviewed, noting that a patient with a broken leg would end up in a different department than someone with severe respiratory issues from the coronavirus.
“If I enter the hospital because I have to have surgery it is not possible that I end up in a Covid or pneumology department, because it means that they do not treat me for what is my basic problem,” he added.
In other countries, there have been issues with some deaths being reported as being caused by the coronavirus when there were underlying medical issues that contributed to the death of a person.
One example came last year in the Canadian province of Alberta when the chief medical officer of health Dr Deena Hinshaw claimed a 14-year-old boy had died of the Wuhan coronavirus but after the family of the boy revealed he had died of cancer after being diagnosed with a brain tumour, the province removed the boy from the coronavirus death toll.
Hinshaw then apologized for her initial statement telling the family of the boy, “The pain of losing a child is terrible enough without having that loss compounded by a public debate about the circumstances. I’m sorry if the way that I spoke about that death made your grief worse.”
“While the initial report of the death of the 14-year-old included COVID as a secondary cause, we have now received additional information that indicates COVID was not a cause of death,” Hinshaw added.