We’re still only on the first steps of the road to learning how badly the COVID pandemic was handled by the government, the media, and, well… pretty much everyone. But the veil is slowly being lifted regarding some of the unforced errors that were made. Even the legacy media is starting to admit that a serious math error took place alongside the many other errors being discovered. Specifically, the total count of COVID hospitalizations and deaths being reported was obviously far higher than it should have been. At Townhall, our colleague Sarah Arnold reports that a CNN medical specialist and Washington Post columnist has been allowed to speak the truth. Many of the people hospitalized “for COVID” sought medical care for entirely different reasons, and many of the dead did not actually die from COVID or anything related to it.

Nearly two years after the Covid-19 pandemic, CNN medical analyst and Washington Post columnist Dr. Lena Wen admitted that hospitals were exaggerating the number of deaths they claimed was from Covid.

Titled, “We Are Over-Counting COVID Deaths and Hospitalizations. That’s a Problem,” Wren acknowledged that “90 percent of patients diagnosed with COVID are actually in the hospital for some other illness.”

“Since every hospitalized patient gets tested for covid, many are incidentally positive,” Wren wrote, citing Robin Dretler, an attending physician at Emory Decatur Hospital.

As Sarah points out, while this admission may be a welcome step toward setting the record straight, it’s coming out two years too late. Those death and hospitalization figures were used to justify all manner of government overreach and oppression. Learning these facts now will not do anything to change the past.

So how could the math possibly have been so wrong? That’s easy enough to explain. Every patient or body showing up at a hospital or a morgue was tested for COVID. If the test came back positive, that person was added to the count. So a nearly asymptomatic person who was hit by a car and died was added to the death toll. A patient admitted to the hospital with a knife wound to the stomach who tested positive was listed as another “COVID hospitalization.”

It’s not as if at least some of us didn’t already know this. There were people, including leading doctors and virologists, who were talking about this all through 2021. Or at least they were trying to talk about it. You didn’t hear a peep about this on MSNBC or CNN unless it was a segment calling out “misinformation.” Dr. Robert Malone, an actual mRNA vaccine research scientist, was banned from Twitter for trying to bring up this issue. (He was reinstated after Musk took over.)

Keep in mind that we’re talking about the period in 2021 when the virus was still running wild. Pandemic porn was at a premium on cable news outlets and in the larger newspapers. Andrew Cuomo was still giving his Emmy-winning (later rescinded) daily pandemic updates and being touted as the nation’s “shadow president.” CNN kept a running count of the deaths and hospitalizations in the upper right corner of the screen 24/7 no matter what story they were currently covering.

It was all vastly exaggerated and plenty of experts knew it. But nobody wanted to talk about it. Pandemic porn translated into ratings and rising numbers justified ever-increasing levels of government actions, from lockdowns to school closures to immunity passports to mandates and more. If you go through and subtract out all of the false positives, it now seems nearly certain that COVID will have turned out to be not all that much worse than the common flu. The only difference was that large swaths of the population were already either vaccinated against the flu or had developed their own natural immunity after surviving it. Nobody had immunity to COVID, so of course the first wave would hit us harder.

There are going to be a lot of people with much to answer for when all of this is said and done. Will any of them be held accountable? Don’t hold your breath. (And if you do hold your breath for too long, you’ll probably be taken to the emergency room and counted as another “COVID hospitalization.”)