Wilmington, NC – Novant Health New Hanover Regional Medical Center released a statement dismissing rumors that the hospital was inaccurately reporting coronavirus hospitalizations to mislead the public, WECT reports.
The viral video features the marketing director and a doctor who served as a former chief of medical staff at New Hanover Regional Medical Center talking about the coronavirus-related information the hospital provides to the public.
The doctor, Mary Rudyk, said she believes hospital messaging should be “a little more terrifying to the public”. She tells the marking director that the hospital should provide information to the public about post-COVID-19 hospitalizations, which the hospital was defining as recovered even though they were still hospitalized, the video says.
The outrage on social media surrounded this suggestion, as many saw it as a test of conspiracy theories about how health officials deliberately inflated COVID-19 numbers.
The video circulated on prominent community groups and pages, such as the New Hanover County Parents and Teachers Association.
In a statement, Novant Health told WECT News that they did not disclose data on patients, “who remain hospitalized for complications of COVID-19 even though they are no longer COVID-19 positive, so it does not provide a complete picture of the total impact of COVID-19 on our patients and our hospitals “.
The spokesman also told WECT they were “concerned about the amount of misinformation in our communities,” saying:
“Team members participating in this fragment of an internal meeting see the highest level of hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19 so far in this pandemic, despite having widely available safe and effective vaccines. This was a frank debate among medical and communications professionals on how we can more accurately convey the severity and severity of what is happening in our hospitals and in our communities.
We continue to care about the amount of misinformation in our communities and constantly strive for more ways to be transparent and tell the whole story. The continued increase in hospitalizations makes it clear that we have more work to do to reach our communities with these messages. “
There are dozens of comments from people questioning hospital data on the NHRMC Facebook page.
“I just saw a video where your staff basically said you need to lie and skew the number of COVID-19 patients so you can scare people and tell them to get vaccinated or they will die,” one person commented on Facebook’s NHRMC page. “I’d like to know where the money goes. Lying and trying to scare people? Why would anyone want to trust your hospital?”
Rudyk said in the video that the hospital had to be forceful with its messaging.
“If he doesn’t get vaccinated, he knows he’s going to die,” he said. “Let’s be really forceful with these people.”
Health officials said Thursday that an additional eight deaths from COVID-19 were recorded in the first week of September, bringing the total number of New Hanover County residents who have died of COVID-19 to 213.
About 56% of the county is fully vaccinated, according to data from the State Department of Health.
“We are seeing a huge increase in our patients with COVID. They are admitted more sick, we are admitting them faster than our previous increase,” said Keisha Coleman, an NHRMC ICU nurse.
For more information on this story, go to WECT News.