Hospital protocolists sticking to the strict hand-me-down highly profitable “COVID protocol” may have doomed a majority of admitted COVID-19 patients to death due to a perfect storm of institutional failure.
The majority of “cases,” I pointed out, would be false because the test was to be used as a screening device—and when you screen with an imperfect test when prevalence is low, you end up with more false positives than negatives in the set of positives.
“Recent data suggest that secondary pneumonia is present in up to 40% and pneumonia or diffuse alveolar damage is present in over 90% of autopsy specimens obtained from patients with acute SARS-CoV-2 infection (18).
“Consistent with these observations, we and others found high rates of ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) in patients with SARS-CoV-2 pneumonia requiring mechanical ventilation, suggesting that bacterial superinfections such as VAP may contribute to mortality in patients with COVID-19 (7, 19–22).
“These data suggest mortality associated with severe SARS-CoV-2 pneumonia is more often associated with respiratory failure that increases the risk of unresolving VAP and is less frequently associated with multiple-organ dysfunction.”

Although their analysis restricted consideration to bacterial pneumonia cases detected 48 hours after ventilation, they did not distinguish between undiagnosed cases of bacterial pneumonia upon admission and those acquired in-hospital (nosocomial infection).
The study leads to the stunning potential that perhaps 58 percent of “COVID” cases were respiratory issues other than COVID-19 (43 percent bacterial pneumonia, 16 percent non-pathogen causes of respiratory failure). Treated as “COVID,” these patients were doomed to a fate of non-treatment due to mis- or under-diagnosis.
It is unclear what percentage of deaths attributed to COVID-19 could have been prevented via a standard therapy for bacterial pneumonia, but it is potentially very high.