Tracking must be done separately between people who are admitted to the nation's hospitals for COVID infections and those who are admitted for other reasons and test positive for the disease, Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, said on Newsmax Monday.
"Before vaccines were available, people did not randomly get admitted for COVID," Jha said on Newsmax's "Wake Up America." "What has happened, especially since people started getting boosted, a lot of people are showing up essentially as an incidental finding with COVID, and that is a very different thing. And so we do have to track that separately from people who are being admitted for COVID."
Jha said he's been working in a hospital and has been seeing "a lot of people admitted because of COVID," but there are also many who are admitted for other matters who "incidentally happened to have COVID."
Those patients, he said, have had their full course of vaccinations and a booster shot, but "they happen to also have been tested positive."
Jha explained that anyone who is admitted to the hospital after coming in through an emergency room is given a PCR test, which can still show positive results after someone has been infected.
"Somebody might have had an infection two weeks ago and they might test positive," but that person still must be treated for COVID and put in isolation, he added. "It's a bit of a mess."
Meanwhile, many schools are closed to in-person learning because of the rapid spread of the omicron variant, but Jha said all schools should be open.
"Remote learning for kids has been a disaster, and at this point in the pandemic, there is no good basis for it," he said. "Even if schools haven't done the upgrades of ventilation, and all of that, the bottom line is, teachers are vaccinated and boosted and they can wear a high-quality mask.
"Kids can be masked, and most kids can be vaccinated. I have no good reason that I can think of why we can't have in-person education for every kid in America."
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