HARRISBURG — Last week, top officials for the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center — a $21 billion dollar health-care system with tremendous influence over public health policy — made a headline-grabbing claim about the ongoing rise of coronavirus cases in Allegheny County.
In noting the new cases had not led to a major increase in hospitalizations or deaths, Graham Snyder, a physician and medical director of infection prevention, claimed the strain of COVID-19 that UPMC was detecting was less severe than a previous version of the virus.
“You may have heard in the news that there is a dominant global strain, one that seems to transmit easier but is less deadly,” Snyder said at the July 9 press briefing. “That’s the strain we’re detecting. And our data supports those characteristics.”
But a Spotlight PA review of the studies cited by UPMC, as well as interviews with experts in virology and epidemiology, found the assertion is not supported by current research.
“It’s an extraordinary claim, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.
In this case, Rasmussen said, the evidence is simply not there.
When contacted for proof of Snyder’s claim that the virus had become less severe, Allison Hydzik, a spokesperson for UPMC, responded with a link to a study published in the journal Cell.
But the study itself contradicts UPMC’s own takeaways.
Regarding the new strain of the virus, the researchers “did not find evidence” of impact on disease severity, the paper said. There is no evidence COVID-19 has become more — or less — severe.
When Spotlight PA asked for clarity from Hydzik and for further proof of UPMC’s claims, she sent another scientific paper about the mutated strain.
But this second paper stated unequivocally: “Further studies will be necessary to determine the impact of this change on the nature and severity of COVID-19.”
For weeks, scientists have been tangled in a heated debate about the topic.
Part of the issue is that the original study,