PORTLAND, Ore. — Fred Creasy was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer at the end of June. Doctors gave the 81-year-old just 30 days to live. He died at the end of July while in hospice care at Avamere Rehabilitation Facility in Newport.
“They told my daughter you better come down here because it's going to be today. And within five hours he was gone,” said daughter Rhonda McCrary.
McCrary said her father tested positive for COVID-19 around the same time of his cancer diagnosis.
“He had no symptoms. He wasn't even quarantined,” said McCrary.
McCrary said her dad died from advanced cancer and Avamere considered Creasy recovered from the coronavirus. A few days after his death, Lincoln County Public Health reported Creasy as the county’s ninth COVID-19 death.
“I mean, that’s not what he died from. He died from colon cancer, not COVID and places are listing loved ones as COVID deaths. And they're labeling that and it's just not true,” said McCrary.
McCrary said Creasy died with COVID-19, not from COVID-19, and there’s obviously a difference.
Other families across Oregon are also questioning why their loved ones are being counted as COVID-19 deaths, including the family of a 26-year-old Oregon man who was listed as a COVID-19 death but tested negative for the virus.
According to the Oregon Health Authority (OHA), there is no difference when it comes to tracking and reporting COVID deaths. OHA spokesman Jonathan Modie explained in an email how the state determines what is counted as a COVID-19 death:
We consider COVID-19 deaths to be:
Deaths in which a patient hospitalized for any reason within 14 days of a positive COVID-19 test result dies in the hospital or within the 60 days following discharge.
Deaths in which COVID-19 is listed as a primary or contributing cause of death on a death certificate.
We count COVID-19 deaths this way because the virus can often have effects on an individual’s health that may complicate their recovery from other diseases and conditions, even injuries, and indirectly contribute to their death. Another reason is because OHA is using this data to track the spread of the disease, and to create actionable steps for stopping its spread.
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Colorado previously reported deaths the same way Oregon does. State health officials were counting people who died from COVID-19 and with COVID-19 as the same thing. But after public outcry, the state
changed how they reported coronavirus deaths to differentiate between people who died from COVID-19 and people who died with COVID-19.
“As a clinician and as a physician, that kind of classification makes a lot more sense to me because then we've got more granularity on the data and we know exactly who is directly related to COVID, whereas who may have just died while being infected with COVID,” said Dr. Kohli.
Dying with COVID and dying from COVID are same thing in Oregon | kgw.com
Now, we're up to 3 states.