Rochelle Walensky admits 40% of covid hospitalisations aren't for covid

BAIER: Speaking of statistics, it seems to make a big difference if a person in the hospital is in the hospital for COVID-19 or with COVID-19. It's been almost a year since you've been running the agency. Do we have that split on numbers?

WALENSKY: You know, what I will say it differs by each variant. First of all, we're doing screening in many hospitals, of everybody who’s walking in the door.

What we are seeing with the Omicron variant is that it tends to be milder person by person, but given how large the numbers are that we’re seeing more and more cases come into the hospital.

In some hospitals that we've talked to, up to 40 percent of the patients who are coming in with COVID-19 are coming in not because they’re sick with COVID, but because they’re coming in with something else and have had to -- COVID or the omicron variant detected.

BAIER: Right. But I guess you know how many of the 836,000 deaths in the U.S. linked to COVID are from COVID or how many are with COVID but they had other comorbidities, do you have that breakdown?

WALENSKY: Yes, of course. With omicron, we are following that very carefully. Our death registry, of course, takes a few weeks to -- it takes a few weeks to collect and, of course, omicron has just been with us for a few weeks. But those data will be forthcoming.