Dr. Scott Atlas, former chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center and a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, offered a potential explanation about why COVID hospitalizations are rising among younger people in Texas.
Appearing on Monday night’s “The Story with Martha MacCallum,” Atlas said that, since everyone who gets hospitalized for any reason is getting tested for COVID-19, the people making up the inflated statistics could actually be “hospitalized for something else” but “classified as COVID-19 hospitalizations.”
WATCH:
“What is your thought on that, do you think that 25% of the cases are being hospitalized are people 20-29, does that seem unusual?” MacCallum asked.
“No,” Atlas said. “I think that’s counter to any other data point we have. We have a state that has detailed evidence, Florida. We see that although there is a huge rise in cases, they are almost all overwhelmingly healthy young people. They are not being hospitalized. They are not dying. The deaths are going down per day. The hospitalizations are going down per day. It’s just not likely.”
“I think that what is happening in Texas, I know that this is true, they are testing every person that gets hospitalized for Covid-19,” Atlas continued. “We know that the vast majority of people with COVID-19 who are young, particularly, are asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic. I question if those people who are positive for COVID-19 and being hospitalized for something else are classified as COVID-19 hospitalizations. That’s a big difference.”
Atlas went on to explain that younger people getting the infection is actually a good thing because it leads to herd immunity over the long term. (RELATED: Staying In Place Is ‘Actually Harmful’: Stanford’s Scott Atlas Makes The Case For Herd Immunity)
“That’s because we have learned to protect the older people and we are now dealing with infections in people who have essentially no problem with the infection,” he said. “This is proven all over the world, not just in the U.S., every country in the world shows us. It’s not arguable, really. And so when we look at that, we see a lot of people who have no problem getting the infection, that’s exactly how a population develops immunity.”