“We need to be more scary to the public”
“Let’s run it up through marketing”
By Jared Evan– Novant Health New Hanover Regional Medical Center in North Carolina has issued a statement after a video of an internal discussion on how the hospital reports its COVID patient count was leaked on social media, WECT 6 reported.
The clip went viral resulting in the hospital making a statement.
Senior doctors discuss inflating COVID numbers by counting recovered patients as active COVID patients.
“We need to be more scary to the public. If you don’t get vaccinated, you know you’re going to die.”pic.twitter.com/KVDIbUq9ZV
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) September 12, 2021
The video begins with the hospital’s Director of Marketing, Carolyn Fisher, explaining what information the hospital provides in terms of COVID-19 numbers, with specific mention of the percentage of unvaccinated hospitalizations.
Dr. Mary Rudyk, who previously served as Chief of Medical Staff for NHRMC, responds bluntly, saying she feels the hospital’s messaging needs to be “a little bit more scary for the public.” She then proposes including patients she characterizes as “post-COVID” in the hospital’s case count – the primary source of the outrage on social media, WECT 6 in North Carolina reported.
In other words, they are discussing using marketing to manipulate the public’s emotions, as opposed to using detailed data, showing newly hospitalized patients vs recovered but still hospitalized, Dr. Mary Rudyk suggests including those who have recovered but remain in the hospital in the case count without differentiating them, therefore painting a more frightening portrait via pubic relations techniques.
NHRMC is not using Dr. Rudyk’s suggestions, as per their issued response.
Another individual than towards the end of the video says “Let’s run it up through marketing”
“I think we have to be more blunt, we have to be more forceful, we have to say something coming out, ‘you know you don’t get vaccinated, you know you’re going to die.’ I mean, let’s just be really blunt to these people”, Dr. Mary Rudyk also states
Novant Health issued the following statement to North Carolina WECT 6, an NBC affiliate:
“The team members involved in this excerpt of an internal meeting are seeing the highest level of COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths so far in this pandemic – despite having safe and effective vaccines widely available. This was a frank discussion among medical and communications professionals on how we can more accurately convey the severity and seriousness of what’s happening inside of our hospitals and throughout our communities. Specifically, the data we have been sharing does not include patients who remain hospitalized for COVID-19 complications even though they are no longer COVID-19 positive, so it does not provide a complete picture of the total impact of COVID-19 on our patients and on our hospitals. We continue to be concerned with the amount of misinformation in our communities and consistently strive for more ways to be transparent and tell the whole story. The continued rise of hospitalizations makes it evident that we have more work to do to reach our communities with these messages.”
Editorial Note: The hospital’s statement claims they are concerned with misinformation, what Dr. Mary Rudyk suggested doing with the data would be a form of misinformation, including recovered patients who no longer have COVID, with new COVID infected, can be considered manipulative.
