[HN Gopher] Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive ...
___________________________________________________________________
Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission
Author : mrfusion
Score : 108 points
Date : 2021-07-27 13:32 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.telegraph.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.telegraph.co.uk)
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.is/N4cO6
| senectus1 wrote:
| hmmm is this a new variant?
|
| or have they got bad testing processes outside of hospitals? So
| many things this might be...
| sokoloff wrote:
| The main point of the article (at least as I understood it) is
| that I could be hospitalized for an open fracture in my leg,
| tested for COVID while there, test comes back positive (either
| true or false positive) and be counted as a "hospitalized COVID
| case".
| senectus1 wrote:
| but couldn't this also mean? :
|
| false positives new variant that infects but doesn't overtly
| affect or maybe a larger number of asymptomatic types than
| originally thought.
| bananapub wrote:
| what suggests to you that there is any notable number of
| false positives?
| sokoloff wrote:
| Primarily that "all lab tests have errors" and if you test
| everyone who is hospitalized for any reason (which is
| sensible), you're inevitably going to get some false
| positives.
|
| Secondarily, in any low-incidence scenario (such as might
| be the case for "COVID infections among the vaccinated"),
| even high specificity tests have a high false rate among
| positive tests.
| a9h74j wrote:
| Not an epidemiologist, but prior to Covid I have never
| seen a professional risk-benefit discussion around
| screening tests, which did _not_ give serious weight to
| the various costs of false positives. Patient anxiety.
| Rounds of invasive biopsies not without risk. Financial
| costs of the same.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I agree (and declined a particular medical screening test
| [with the advice and consent of my doctor] at my most
| recent physical because the overall outcomes are worse
| for testing than not).
|
| I think this one as applied to COVID is some mix of fear
| and human logical frailty. I can only imagine the hue and
| cries that we'd get if "Hospital XYZ isn't even testing
| all their patients for COVID!" came to light. That could
| be used to feed into the "COVID is a hoax!", "Insurance
| companies are evil; we need single-payer so that costs
| don't become an obstacle", and many other narratives.
| kalleboo wrote:
| The vaccine is rendering infected people asymptomatic. So they
| never think to get tested because they don't feel sick. Then
| they break their leg, go to hospital, get tested as a matter of
| course, and now get counted as someone hospitalized with COVID.
|
| Or they feel vaguely sick, it feels like a flu (due to delta
| having more cold-like rather than covid-like symptoms) and go
| to the hospital without getting tested for COVID first, and
| then get tested in the hospital.
|
| We don't know, the data doesn't say.
| ck2 wrote:
| Well let's see, covid is clearly airborne as proven several times
| in the past year and the one place guaranteed to have covid in
| the air from severe cases (shedding) is a hospital.
|
| I'm more impressed with people at the hospital not for covid with
| an extended stay who leave without covid.
|
| Imagine an emergency waiting room in the USA.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| I went to a US emergency room during the peak of a wave.
| Everyone was masked. They also did COVID-19 symptom tests
| before admitting people. This isn't perfect, but it greatly
| reduces the odds of having some person with unexplained
| "breathing problems" or whatever accidentally contaminating the
| ER.
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| As opposed to the Covid-skeptics, I tend to view the rules
| and regulations as half-assed, based on last year's
| information, and not enough. You wrote "Everyone was masked"
| as if that's enough. Hopefully the room was well ventilated,
| because if someone had been breathing out virus particles for
| a long time in a stuffy room and you walk into it, it's
| probably very likely you'll breathe in the virus, especially
| if you're just wearing a surgical mask and not N95.
|
| https://english.elpais.com/society/2020-10-28/a-room-a-
| bar-a...
| literallyaduck wrote:
| Link is paywalled on mobile, thanks for the archive. Hospital
| tents that house the plague victims would be safer for regular
| hospital patients who were not originally infected. Doctors and
| nurses interacting with plague victims shouldn't work with any
| other patients and should stay in the quarantine zone until they
| are cleared.
| bartread wrote:
| Could you tone it down a bit, please?
|
| In common English parlance "plague" or "the plague" almost
| always refers to bubonic plague or diseases caused by the same
| bacterium (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubonic_plague).
|
| COVID and "the plague" have very little in common. In
| particular the former is caused by a virus, the latter by a
| bacterium. Beyond the obviously different types of pathogen,
| their symptoms, mechanisms of transmission, prevention,
| management, and treatment are also quite different.
|
| Moreover using unnecessarily incendiary language to discuss
| COVID, even if you think you're just being funny, isn't helpful
| because it's too easy for people to misinterpret.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| Have you been to an ER recently? At least at my hospital this
| is exactly what they do. There's a tent next to the ER
| entrance. They ask a bunch of questions about symptoms and do a
| temperature check. If you appear COVID+ they send you to the
| tent, otherwise you go to the regular ER.
| a9h74j wrote:
| Off-topic, but there could come a day when it is safer as a
| regular patient to be operated upon in a makeshift tent.
|
| A doctor with Doctors Without Borders once said in an
| interview that with field tents, they did not have problems
| with the usual hospital-borne infections. He said it was due
| to the constant turnover of air and organisms.
| literallyaduck wrote:
| The doctors and nurses work with non-covid patients and covid
| patients, it could be that the state I'm in hasn't gotten the
| memo.
| peteradio wrote:
| Comments so far seem to misunderstand the issue. People are not
| catching Covid in the hospital. They are in the hospital for non-
| covid reasons (broken leg, pink eye etc) but if they test
| positive it will show up in statistics as a "Covid
| Hospitalization". That is terribly misleading because we want to
| understand if Covid is causing an increase in hospitalizations,
| this is attributing other causes to Covid.
| derbOac wrote:
| Am American, not UK, but have worked in hospitals and
| surrounded by family working in hospitals during the pandemic.
|
| This is a grey area here, because people don't always "come in
| because of COVID," they come in for symptom X, which might be
| exacerbated or caused by COVID. If someone has a set of chronic
| diseases, sure they have that, but the question is "why did
| they come into the ED today?" The answer to that is sometimes
| COVID even though they didn't know it. How this looks on a
| hospital chart is really fuzzy because it depends on all kinds
| of things; ICD coding can be ambiguous.
|
| There's also been some cases of COVID contracted in the
| hospital (the ones I have person familiarity with), but that is
| much less rare, and rarer as the year has gone on.
|
| There are also cases of people coming in for reasons unrelated
| to COVID, and finding out they were positive just
| coincidentally.
|
| There's also cases where it's really unclear.
| raziel2p wrote:
| I mean, they _may_ be catching covid in hospitals, there 's no
| way to know for sure, but it seems unlikely to account for all
| these cases.
|
| But yeah this is going to be picked up by covid-deniers as more
| "proof" that covid is exaggarated.
| jaywalk wrote:
| I don't think "Covid deniers" make up any significant
| percentage of the population, but that doesn't change the
| fact that this _is_ proof that Covid is exaggerated.
| simpleguitar wrote:
| I think covid deniers _do_ make up a significant percentage
| of the population, and they would take this _as proof_ of
| exaggeration even though it really isn 't.
|
| US has had 1M excess deaths. That's a million people _more_
| than usual. http://www.healthdata.org/special-
| analysis/estimation-excess...
| jaywalk wrote:
| How is this not proof of exaggeration? Somebody in the
| hospital for a broken leg being counted as a "Covid
| hospitalization" just because they also happened to test
| positive for Covid means that the numbers are inflated.
| Period.
|
| Covid is real. Covid numbers are inflated. You're arguing
| against a fictional "Covid denier" boogeyman which
| doesn't really exist.
| yKnoTho wrote:
| Regardless of why they were admitted they still had
| covid.
|
| You're trying to answer what sent someone to hospital,
| not who has covid.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Your paper isn't fact. It is an estimated published by
| perhaps one of the worst modelers out there. The IHME has
| been publishing scary models that couldn't even
| accurately predict what was happening the day they were
| published.
| snegu wrote:
| I am not by any means a "covid-denier," but it seems to me
| this is evidence that the impact of Covid may be exaggerated.
| It's hard to say by how much (and I would be interested to
| learn if this is happening in US hospitals also).
| jmull wrote:
| > this is evidence that the impact of Covid may be
| exaggerated
|
| I don't think so. When assessing the impact of Covid, we
| look at the change in overall, all-cause numbers, like all-
| cause deaths. (Which do show a big impact.)
|
| The reason we watch covid hospitalizations is that it is a
| good _leading_ indicator of covid deaths. The "leading"
| part is important, because that allows health policy to
| react faster to what's happening, which makes it more
| effective at reducing the impact of Covid.
|
| (You may also worry that covid deaths are being similarly
| over-counted, but the all-cause death numbers tell us we're
| actually undercounting the overall number.)
|
| Anyway, I guess ultimately we can't stop people from
| misusing the covid hospitalizations number, but it is a
| very useful number.
| willyt wrote:
| I haven't checked this as the full data the article was based
| on wasn't given in the article, but it wouldn't make much sense
| to count out-patients as part of the covid hospitalisation
| statistics, so I imagine that the word "hospitalisation" means
| in-patients specifically i.e. people who are sick enough to
| stay in a bed in a ward for a night or more, so things like
| pink-eye, fractures, even child birth (without complications)
| wouldn't count.
| peteradio wrote:
| Very good point!
| literallyaduck wrote:
| "People are not catching Covid in the hospital" that is
| nonsense. They are, and the question is how many. The next
| question is if it is a significant number, is there a good way
| to prevent it.
| minitoar wrote:
| I think OPs point is that this scenario is not the focus or
| point of the article.
| peteradio wrote:
| I should have said, that is not what the article is talking
| about. This is about miscategorization.
| nerdponx wrote:
| I know (anecdotally) of one person who was in the hospital
| for an orthopedic surgery, caught Covid during their 3-day
| recovery stay, then got pneumonia and ended up having to stay
| for 10 days.
| seriousquestion wrote:
| Another issue that is skewing the data:
|
| Early in the pandemic, the United States had an undertesting
| problem. Now we are overtesting those who are immune and
| asymptomatic. A person with immunity to the coronavirus will
| fight off an infection. But during and after the person's
| exposure to the virus, it's common for a low number of virus
| particles to be detectable in the nose. In medicine, we call
| this virus a "colonizer" -- a pathogen that does not cause
| illness or spread the illness. It's an incidental finding. But
| in today's world of routine coronavirus testing of vaccinated
| people, these positive tests are inflating the number of
| positive cases in a misleading way.
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/07/21/covid-test...
| makomk wrote:
| The trouble is that there's this unfortunate tendency to try
| and deal with this by having different standards for what
| gets counted as a covid case depending on whether the
| person's vaccinated - either by testing vaccinated people
| less as suggested in that article or by interpreting the test
| results differently. Which makes all statistics about the
| proportion of people who catch Covid, are hospitalized with
| it, etc who are vaccinated _complete and utter garbage_ - at
| that point you 're not finding Covid cases amongst vaccinated
| people simply because you're not looking. It resulted in
| initial numbers out of Israel that seem to have wildly
| overstated vaccine effectiveness against current variants,
| and I suspect the same might be happening in the USA right
| now.
| rory wrote:
| > _in today's world of routine coronavirus testing of
| vaccinated people_
|
| It's worth noting that the CDC is explicitly telling people
| not to do this:
|
| _If you've been around someone who has COVID-19, you do not
| need to stay away from others or get tested unless you have
| symptoms._
| (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/fully-
| vac...)
|
| Agreed that people are still doing it though. That seems
| reasonable to me given the mixed data around to what degree
| the vaccine prevents spread.
| fffwaew wrote:
| Fauci is a BIO-TERRORIST and directly funded the Wuhan Lab.
|
| He admitted so himself in this presentation:
|
| https://rumble.com/viskb1-anthony-faucis-presentation-of-gai...
|
| Fauci needs to be arrested, tried, and PUT TO DEATH.
|
| The CDC needs to be de-funded, closed, and all execs tried for
| treason.
|
| Fuck everyone on this site that wears a mask or got the jab.
| Seriously - you are all tools of the fascist state. I hope you
| get ran over by cars you fucking assholes.
| chefandy wrote:
| Yes, the data should be published-- all relevant data should be
| published. But it says they just started _gathering_ data a
| couple of weeks ago. So does the fact that it hasn 't been
| officially packaged and published mean it's _leaked_ as they
| repeatedly intimate? Or maybe it just wasn 't published yet?
| Maybe they found anomalies? Just being the NHS and moving slowly?
|
| Is it also hard to imagine that many people hospitalized because
| of COVID wouldn't regularly get COVID tests, even when sick? Most
| are older people more likely to have limited mobility, limited
| financial means, and difficulty navigating the world.
|
| I don't mean to insinuate that their suppositions are false!
| Maybe everything is as they say, the government is counting
| people hospitalized for any reason at all as a COVID
| hospitalization, AND the number of people hospitalized with COVID
| who would not have otherwise been hospitalized is significant.
| Maybe they're doing it to justify overbroad public health
| intervention, as many assert. They don't provide any evidence of
| that, though. We just don't know.
|
| This data could help us know, and I wouldn't be so critical if
| they were just dinging the NHS for not releasing it quickly
| enough. The Telegraph, however, is using this to bolster an
| ostensibly uninterrogated postulation without presenting any
| empirical evidence.
|
| (malformed quotes are on them) _Prof Carl Heneghan, director of
| the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of
| Oxford, said: "This data is incredibly important, and it should
| be published on an ongoing basis. _ _" When people hear about
| hospitalisations with Covid, they will assume that Covid is the
| likely cause, but this data shows something quite different -
| this is about Covid being detected after tests were looking for
| it."_
|
| The one expert they quoted. I read this quote as saying "people
| hospitalized for covid" is a different number than "hospitalized
| people who were found to have covid," which _could_ be what those
| numbers represent, but we don 't know. The Telegraph, however, is
| really grabbing the reader's steering wheel with bits like this:
|
| _" Experts said the high number of cases being detected
| belatedly - at a time when PCR tests were widely available -
| suggested many such patients had been admitted for other
| reasons."_
|
| That sentence wouldn't even pass muster on Wikipedia because of
| the weasel words. That's at the very least a heavily slanted
| interpretation of a quote and possibly a deliberate
| misrepresentation. That they attributed uncited "experts" rather
| than "this particular professor," I'd guess they're leaning
| towards the latter and completely aware of it.
| telesilla wrote:
| Is the Telegraph a paper of good repute? The article feels to me
| as somehow manipulative however I'm not local to the UK. I am
| wondering if this is propaganda or if these results are actually
| plausible.
| jjgreen wrote:
| It's a Tory (conservative) paper and always has been,
| traditional or reactionary depending on your point of view. Not
| sensationalist.
|
| The Irish comic Dave Allen characterised the British press as
| follows:
|
| _One of the things about Britain, actually: you can always
| tell the way a person votes by the paper they read. For
| example, The Times is read by people who run the country. The
| Financial Times is read by people who own the country. The
| Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who own and run
| the country. The Daily Mirror is read by the people who think
| they run the country. The Guardian is read by people who think
| that they should run the country. The Morning Star, or as it
| used to be known as, the Daily Worker is read by people who
| think that the country should be run by another country. The
| Daily Express is read by people who think that the country
| should be run as it was. The Daily Telegraph is read by people
| who think that it still is. And The Sun is read by people who
| don't care who rules the country as long as they've got big
| boobs._
|
| You get the idea
| hackeraccount wrote:
| Wasn't that in Yes, Minister? Or was it a shorter version...
| it's been awhile since I saw that show but that's almost the
| only joke a remember distinctly. Oh, that and the line, "If
| you want to stab someone in the back you first need to get
| behind them," which I reference not infrequently.
| iggldiggl wrote:
| It was, but it wasn't the original source of that quote.
|
| Someone tried tracking down the source here:
| http://www.dirtyfeed.org/2021/04/what-the-papers-say/
| alimw wrote:
| This is a newspaper that decides what the news is going to be
| and then goes out to find the sources to support that.
| rsynnott wrote:
| I mean, it employed Boris Johnson as a columnist; you do the
| maths.
|
| More seriously, it's a bit of an oddity, really; it's a
| broadsheet under the normal classification, but certainly has
| tabloid-y elements.
| bananapub wrote:
| it's historically a reasonable newspaper but lately is
| extremely closely aligned with the ruling Tory party and their
| desires, to the point of everyone reading the online edition on
| Sundays to see what will be announced by the government on
| Monday.
| doesnotexist wrote:
| Didn't The Telegraph endorse Boris Johnson? I'm not super
| well versed in UK politics, but as Prime Minister Boris
| Johnson is also the "Leader of the Conservative Party" right?
| And the Tory party merged with another party to form the
| Conservative party so are they now a wing or subset of the
| Conservative Party? Is Boris Johnson in the Tory subset?
| rjknight wrote:
| "Tory" is just a colloquial term for "member or supporter
| of the Conservative party". It started out as an insult a
| couple of centuries ago, but has long since lost that
| association.
|
| The Telegraph didn't just endorse Boris Johnson - he worked
| for the paper back in the 1990s, and after resigning his
| position as Foreign Secretary in 2018, he wrote regular
| columns for them.
| mandmandam wrote:
| Tory is still an insult in Ireland. Probably Scotland
| too.
| skywhopper wrote:
| That happened 150 years ago. Today, "Tory" is another name
| for a member of the Conservative Party.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| It's a mainstream paper and it's pretty good by the standards
| of the British press. It's got a right-wing slant but that's
| not a bad thing in and of itself, it's not sensationalist in
| the same way the tabloids are. It's been more overtly Tory (in
| contrast with small-c conservative) over the last few years but
| I suspect that has a lot to do with our current Prime Minister
| having once been on their payroll as a journalist.
|
| I tend to read a range of ideological slants when it comes to
| the British press, I find the _Telegraph_ 's and the _Guardian_
| 's takes to be the most interesting of the bunch usually.
| pavon wrote:
| > Experts said it meant the national statistics, published daily
| on the government website and frequently referred to by
| ministers, may far overstate the levels of pressures on the NHS.
|
| I don't understand this part. Isn't the important number here the
| total number of people in the hospital (or ICU or other ward)
| relative to the total number that the hospital (or ICU or other
| ward) can accommodate? Or alternatively, the total excess
| relative to normal years.
|
| I can see the utility in differentiating these numbers for other
| reasons, although the accounting could be tricky, to handle cases
| where people are admitted for one thing then develop another, or
| show symptoms that could have a number of causes.
| beerandt wrote:
| "Available" beds/ hospital capacity is usually a floating
| number, and it's not an absolute capacity, it's just the
| instant capacity at that moment. It changes in response to
| demand.
|
| Hospitals don't count closed wards/wings/floors that can be
| staffed and "activated." Same goes for converting other
| areas/depts of the hospital to covid units. Which is why it's
| better to monitor absolute cases or deaths, not % "capacity".
| simonh wrote:
| The reason to population numbers and trends are important is to
| work out what's happening in the population, and therefore plan
| for dealing with changes in case load. Measuring current
| pressure on the NHS is important yes, but knowing that cases in
| the population are rising or not, and if so by how much, is
| also vital information for resource planning.
|
| Having said that, clearly the tests are being recalibrated and
| their usage adjusted as new information becomes available.
| These adjustments in tests seem to have increased accuracy.
| Isn't that what we want? There's no conspiracy or scandal here.
| willyt wrote:
| > I don't understand this part. Isn't the important number here
| the total number of people in the hospital (or ICU or other
| ward) relative to the total number that the hospital (or ICU or
| other ward) can accommodate? Or alternatively, the total excess
| relative to normal years.
|
| I agree with this point and the article doesn't seem to mention
| this, surely the important statistic is number of in-patients
| per week comparing week by week with 2019. If it's much higher
| then there is a big problem regardless of whether these
| patients have covid or not as we haven't built any significant
| hospital capacity or trained a lot more medical staff since
| then.
| vmception wrote:
| So they tested people when or before they arrived and it said
| negative for covid, and then they tested again later while they
| were still in the hospital and it said positive for covid?
|
| _reads article_
|
| Of course people with Covid tested positive after admission
| because the test only occurs after admission.
|
| _reads article again_
|
| Of course the admission symptoms were not "for Covid" as the
| symptoms help you lead down the path of what the ailment is!
|
| This study is about potential errors in reporting, which still
| need to be investigated.
| fidesomnes wrote:
| The threshold for a false positive with Covid is way too high.
| Perhaps half of positive results are false positives. We won't
| know for years due to a certain party's political zeal.
| mavhc wrote:
| So their argument is: everyone is already infected, it's no big
| deal?
|
| Whereas the actual questions are: why are people going into
| hospital without having a Covid test first (assuming non
| emergency)
|
| And: What percentage of the people who tested positive in the
| previous 14 days in hospital because of Covid. And what
| percentage of the people who weren't tested went to hospital
| because of Covid related symptoms.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| More actual questions:
|
| - how soon after exposure do you test positive (eg. if they
| went to the hospital, tested negative, then tested positive
| later there - were they undetectably positive on the first
| test, or did they catch it in the hospital).
|
| - Why do we not separate hospitalized "by" and "with" covid
| (and same for deaths). If half of the hospitalized are there
| because of broken legs and appendicitis, they'd be there, covid
| or not. Same with deaths, if you get hit by a bus and die, 20
| days after a positive test, you're counted as a covid death.
| simonh wrote:
| Half the patients in hospitals over-run with covid patients
| are not there with broken legs and appendicitis. That's
| absurd. The numbers of such people are going to be reasonably
| well understood.
|
| This is why excess hospitalisations and deaths compared to
| seasonal norms are used as a reality check on the test
| numbers. Newspaper headlines might trumped specific numbers
| that are attention grabbing, but actual policy is driven by
| an assessment of all the available data.
| nradov wrote:
| In Santa Clara County COVID-19 deaths were originally over
| counted by 22% before they adjusted the methodology. Other
| public health agencies have had similar data quality
| problems. So not half, but a significant fraction.
|
| https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2021/07/02/santa-clara-
| cou...
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| But half of those people are there with broken legs and
| apendicitis. Only half of those stats are due to covid. As
| an invidual, every person in a hospital is too much... but
| when considering lockdowns, because there are (eg.) a 1000
| people with covid in hospitals, it's worth to know if those
| people are there because of covid, or 560 of them would be
| there normally.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| >why are people going into hospital without having a Covid test
| first (assuming non emergency)
|
| The truth is that once you put aside the creepy fawning
| nationalism around the NHS it's actually got some serious
| systemic issues that never get properly resolved because it's a
| political football. It's not "joined up" very well at all, at
| least in my experience paperwork cockups are pretty much
| universal. The clinical staff are fantastic for the most part
| but the way it's administered and organised is almost comically
| dysfunctional. It's damn-near impossible to actually pin down
| an NHS service to a concrete date or time to get anything done
| in my experience, in some cases you just get ignored unless you
| specifically know that you have to chase them up yourself. I
| ended up going private at my own expense and the conspiracy
| theorist in me reckons that's probably the ultimate aim: let
| the service rot to the point anyone who can afford it will jump
| ship for the private sector.
|
| I have a lot of respect for the people on the ground at the
| NHS, lions led by donkeys indeed.
| puppet-master wrote:
| > comically dysfunctional
|
| intentionally dysfunctional.. there has been a multi-decade
| effort to prep the NHS essentially for complete privatization
| rocgf wrote:
| > let the service rot to the point anyone who can afford it
| will jump ship for the private sector
|
| I think that's pretty far-fetched and can't see a good reason
| for this purposefully being the case. It's just Hanlon's
| razor, really.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| A former health secretary (Jeremy Hunt) co-authored a book
| that laid out this exact strategy.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| There's enough private healthcare interests with links to
| the Conservative Party to at least make it worth raising an
| eyebrow in my opinion. I'm not making any specific
| allegations but it wouldn't be the first time Conservative
| Party ministers got in bed with private interests, the PPE
| scandal of last year comes to mind for example.
|
| You're right of course though, passive incompetence is
| probably more likely than active malice.
| j_walter wrote:
| > passive incompetence is probably more likely than
| active malice.
|
| Well this is pretty much the norm at most levels of
| government around the world. There are no real
| performance indicators being used to judge
| accomplishments or effectiveness for most government
| jobs.
| [deleted]
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| Keep in mind: efficient and organized or not, the government
| check keeps coming.
|
| What are the incentives to improve then?
| [deleted]
| cwp wrote:
| Yeah, those are the right questions. The point of the article
| is that people who go to the hospital for non-Covid reasons -
| eg, broken leg, heart attack, cancer - and then test positive
| are being counted as "hospitalized with Covid" even though they
| don't have a severe case.
|
| So the statistics are being skewed. We don't really know by how
| much, because the article doesn't say how many went to the
| hospital for Covid-related symptoms.
| simonh wrote:
| Well, the you've got to differentiate what are covid related
| symptoms and what aren't. A lot of people with Covid, as with
| many such diseases, actually die of something else. Hence the
| "nobody ever died of covid, it was all because of pre-
| existing conditions" conspiracy theory.
|
| The fact is it probably doesn't matter all that much. Anyway
| who gets to decide what is covid related or not? How do you
| ensure consistent application of selection criteria across
| teams and hospitals?
|
| When your hospitals are filling to capacity with wheezing,
| coughing patients on ventilators the fact your numbers are
| off by a bit is by the by, and your medical staff have enough
| to deal with.
|
| Anyway wouldn't this policy over-count patients who'd got
| vaccinated, went to hospital for an unrelated reason, but
| then tested positive for covid? After all, you can still
| catch covid if you're vaccinated, you just get to fight it
| off quicker. Most likely the statistical impact of all these
| factors isn't all that much though.
| [deleted]
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Another weird trend I picked up reading France reports on the
| pandemic is that non-Covid nosocomial infections decreased
| significantly during the pandemic.[1] As if Covid took over
| antibiotic resistant bacteria (a little) and other infections (a
| lot).
|
| There is no definite explanation, but mistaking other diseases
| for Covid is one hypothesis, along with anti-covid rules
| affecting other diseases.
|
| [1]
| https://www.santepubliquefrance.fr/media/files/01-maladies-e...
|
| Edit: I don't know why the downvotes (no problem with that), but
| in case someone thinks it is a conspiracy theory of some kind,
| Sante publique is an official agency tied to the french ministry
| of health. The conclusion is of course up to debate but you are
| unlikely to find better data.
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| You're going against the narrative, your data and your ideas
| don't matter no matter how legitimate they are. So you get
| downvotes.
| jojo2000 wrote:
| This pandemic is a lie. Get over it and act accordingly.
| CorrectHorseBat wrote:
| Since they will take up space in a covid ward, it's not that
| strange that they are counted as hospitalized by covid in some
| statistics.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| But they will clear up spaces (and doctors and nurses) in other
| wards.
|
| And they're hospitalized "with" covid and not "by" covid. They
| might even be asymptomatic, in the hospital because of a broken
| leg, and they count towards the statistics that we then use for
| new lockdowns.
|
| Same with deaths "by" covid and deaths "from" covid. I know
| it's hard to say, when an 85yo patient with 6 different
| illnesses dies, if it was the covid that killed them or if it
| was unrelated heart failure.
|
| There was even a time where once you tested positive for covid,
| you could only die from that, and nothing else:
| https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/why-no-one-can-ever-recover-fr...
|
| > In summary, PHE's definition of the daily death figures means
| that everyone who has ever had COVID at any time must die with
| COVID too. So, the COVID death toll in Britain up to July 2020
| will eventually exceed 290k, if the follow-up of every test-
| positive patient is of long enough duration.
|
| This was changed to 28 days (i think) later, but atleast having
| a soft separation of "with" "by" and "maybe/probably by" would
| also mean a lot.
| robocat wrote:
| If say 10% of a randomly sampled population tests positive, and
| 56% of admissions test positive, then only 5.6% of admissions
| should be unrelated to Covid[^].
|
| The premise of this article is bullshit. Sure, there will be
| situations where someone comes in with a broken leg (unrelated to
| Covid) and tests positive. Note that the article mentions PCR, so
| we are not talking antibody tests.
|
| Are there figures for what percentage of randomly sampled UK
| population currently tests positive for Covid?
|
| [^] Aside: The 5.6% example number isn't quite right, but the
| figure should be of that order.
| throwitaway1235 wrote:
| Question if it's even possible to answer.
|
| How does the average cycle count for a Covid-19 test compare to a
| flu test?
| doesnotexist wrote:
| Misleading article since as they state "44 per cent involved
| people who tested positive in the 14 days before hospital entry.
| A further 43 per cent were made within two days of admission".
| Thats 87% are positive within 2 days of start of admission but
| the article is very blustery about the non-common case that
| people test positive after discharge for some non-covid admission
| reason.
| timr wrote:
| They say this in the article, so I'm not sure how it's
| "misleading".
|
| The point (which the article discusses) is that it's fairly
| unlikely that someone being admitted for severe Covid has not
| already had at least one positive test prior to admission.
| doesnotexist wrote:
| It's entirely misleading. They don't write 87% of patients
| tested positive before or early on in their admission. Even,
| the headline is written to convey the opposite. What they are
| doing is breaking it into two numbers that are each less than
| 50% to obscure the magnitude of the sum and then lumping the
| second number (patients who tested early in their admission)
| with those who tested positive later. It's easy to overlook
| that testing positive in the first 2 days of admission
| includes people who test positive at t=0 of their hospital
| admission, people who did not get tested prior to arriving at
| hospital. It's more amazing that 44% tested positive prior to
| arriving at hospital!
|
| But all of that is besides the point because the reported
| statistic wasn't even labelled or reported by the original
| source (the NHS) as "covid as cause of admission." The stat
| is labelled "covid positive admissions" which is not
| logically equivalent to "covid, as primary cause of
| admission" The article does mention this distinction but
| they've already led readers on by framing things and setting
| the scene for FUD/ suspicion toward public health
| institutions. Knowing how many patients that were admitted
| and were covid positive is a useful statistic to be tracking
| on it's own right without necessarily attributing the
| admissions to covid. I'd imagine the report that they plucked
| this single statistic from from is filled with lots of other
| data which may include numbers that more closely track
| attribution of the admission to covid. The article implies
| that bad decisions are being made on account of this single
| statistic, which is hard to believe or should be better
| supported in the article's reporting if that is the intended
| takeaway.
|
| Also, consider the usage of the word "leaked" in the article
| and reconcile that with the statement "the leaked statistics
| come from NHS daily situation reports" I'm not even sure what
| they mean by leaked, do you? The NHS is not the GCHQ, their
| data isn't exactly classified top-secret. The entire article
| is written to leave readers with the impression that the wool
| is being pulled over their eyes by public health
| institutions. It plays into paranoia and distrust toward
| government and public institutions.
| [deleted]
| forcry wrote:
| The most baffling thing is not standardising CT values for RT-PCR
| tests.
|
| I have looked and I cannot even find how increasing CT values
| affect the false positive rate for the PCR testing. If my
| understanding is correct a single increment of CT essentially
| doubles the sensitivity of the test, so difference between CT
| value of 35 and 40 is 32 fold.
|
| CDC is suggesting CT value of 28 for detecting breakthrough
| infections after vaccinations. And if I am not mistaken, a lot of
| places was using 35 for the CT value in RT-PCT tests.
|
| So that means, a breakthrough infection needs to have 128 times
| viral load in someone who has been vaccinated to be considered as
| positive, than it is required to have considered as positive in a
| non-vaccinated person.
|
| That is quite ridiculous.
| dataflow wrote:
| Apparently it's even worse: _" Different machines can produce
| different Ct values for the same sample, and the same machine
| can give different Ct values for different samples from the
| same person."_ [1]
|
| I'm not sure I even understand the statement, but I guess it
| means it could be that they (somehow) couldn't report them even
| if they wanted to.
|
| [1] https://medical.mit.edu/covid-19-updates/2020/11/pcr-test-
| re...
| killjoywashere wrote:
| I ran one of the first labs to validate the original CDC
| assay (we got the controls to work). Ct numbers were a
| slippery slope we should never have gone down for COVID-19
| PCR tests because snot is not like blood, a homogenous
| substance with well known homeostatic parameters that are
| under tight physiologic control. Do you know someone went
| swimming? Do you know if they were crying? Did they just eat
| some particularly spicy tacos? Do you know if they have
| Sjogren's disease? What's the humidity? Are they dieting? Add
| in the presence of long COVID, and just long post infectious
| shedding, and it's mildly amazing we can get this to work at
| all. Yes, the test platform produces the data and no, it
| should not be reported. The only thing we can really do is
| confirm presence of the virus.
| a9h74j wrote:
| I would like to see QC statistics from some of the large
| test-processing centers which have IIRC been established.
| _Surely_ they send a blind fraction of known-negative or
| control samples through, to get good statistics on false-
| positive rates?
| xyzzy21 wrote:
| Well if you want to "control public fear" for political and
| economic gain, you just adjust the CT value as required to bump
| up the positive rate or to lower it.
|
| Note that the US CDC is using two different CT values: a higher
| one for unvaccinated and a lower one for vaccinated. That
| doesn't make any sense until you start thinking
| Hobbsian/Hegalian/Machiavellian.
|
| If I was wanting to exploit the situation, this is exactly what
| I'd do. Instead I have ethics however.
| briefcomment wrote:
| Is there any proposed logic behind the difference in
| thresholds between the two groups? It seems designed to do
| just one thing - overestimate cases in the unvaccinated, and
| underestimate cases in the vaccinated. What is the actual
| rationale the CDC provides?
| jonahbenton wrote:
| No. Nearly all EUA PCR COVID tests are qualitative. On
| saliva/sputum samples, that's really the best that can be done.
| They can report one or more Ct values, but those reflect
| specific characteristics of the platform and can not be
| normalized across platforms and cannot be used even to infer
| things like viral load.
| 74d-fe6-2c6 wrote:
| this is at the heart of what "Covidiots", "Querdenker" and
| other tin foil hat people have been saying for more than a year
| ... just b/c you find a single virus or a part of it somewhere
| doesn't mean anything. but ... LOCKDOWN! and think of the
| children!
| timr wrote:
| > I have looked and I cannot even find how increasing CT values
| affect the false positive rate for the PCR testing. If my
| understanding is correct a single increment of CT essentially
| doubles the sensitivity of the test, so difference between CT
| value of 35 and 40 is 32 fold.
|
| I have never used this particular set of primers, but have done
| a lot of PCR. In general, at 30+ cycles, PCR is prone to
| spurious amplification. It depends on the primers, temperature
| profile, and other details, but at these cycle counts you need
| to be skeptical of your results. It's easy to get noise.
|
| I've never been able to fathom how a PCR amplification at 30+
| cycles with no downstream purification or gel visualization is
| considered definitive diagnosis of an illness. I _strongly_
| suspect that the goal was to cast a wide net (i.e. bias toward
| false positives) at the expense of accuracy, but then "cases"
| became some kind of top-line media metric...
| xyzzy21 wrote:
| ANY molecular biologist will tell you that it's NOT.
|
| At 30+ cycles, you are generated false positives off of both
| everyday Common Cold coronavirus, influenza and probably even
| bacteria. Literally you are amplifying noise and then calling
| it a positive.
| cameldrv wrote:
| At the latest low point in the epidemic, some areas were
| seeing test positivity rates of under 0.5%. If false
| positives were a large portion of positives, this would seem
| to be impossible.
| aeternum wrote:
| The problem is the false positive isn't truly independent
| of environmental factors.
|
| PCR determines how many exponential amplifications are
| necessary to get a detectable amount of the target RNA
| sequences.
|
| The amount of that target RNA floating around in the
| environment does slightly impact the base amount present in
| even covid-negative patients.
| cameldrv wrote:
| It's true that people who had COVID can still have viral
| RNA in their noses for a while and still test positive.
|
| The most sensitive tests have a limit of detection of a
| couple hundred copies/ml, and the collection kits usually
| use 1ml of VTM or equivalent. I find it hard to believe
| that a significant number of people will have enough
| viral RNA in their nose to put hundreds of copies onto a
| swab unless it's their own body that's producing those
| copies.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > At the latest low point in the epidemic, some areas were
| seeing test positivity rates of under 0.5%. If false
| positives were a large portion of positives, this would
| seem to be impossible.
|
| Its quite possible, especially if there is a testing bias
| toward people who are less likely to have the disease
| [deleted]
| cameldrv wrote:
| Even if they were testing people that were all externally
| known not to have COVID, if only 0.5% of people are
| testing positive, that's the false positive rate.
|
| All the data we have indicates that false positives on
| PCR are extremely rare. The only place it gets fuzzy is
| the definition of positive. People who were previously
| infected can test positive, and people with very mild
| infections can also test positive. People who have never
| been infected though essentially do not test positive.
| a9h74j wrote:
| To a less-frequent degree than with 'cases' the meaning of
| 'gold-standard' seems to have changed as well, or be starting
| to. As I understand it, a proper _gold-standard_ test is
| proven to have essentially 100% correlation to verified
| clinical symptoms or findings.
| mizzack wrote:
| > I strongly suspect that the goal was to cast a wide net
| (i.e. bias toward false positives) at the expense of
| accuracy, but then "cases" became some kind of top-line media
| metric...
|
| Then in January the WHO updated the diagnostic protocol [1]
| because of that false positive/low confidence problem.
| Unsurprisingly, case counts plummeted in the following weeks.
|
| [1] https://www.who.int/news/item/20-01-2021-who-information-
| not...
| beerandt wrote:
| On inauguration day.
| naturalauction wrote:
| Is there evidence that the cdc/other testing labs
| significantly changed their protocols as a result of this
| new advice?
| apercu wrote:
| Sure, and it could be political. In fact, most things of
| this nature are at that level. So, maybe, the people in
| charge didn't like the previous US government admin so
| they didn't help improve its numbers.
|
| That is certainly more likely and believable than some
| vast left-wing conspiracy to implant Bill Gate's
| microchips in to your iPhone carrying ass to "track" you.
|
| :)
| leereeves wrote:
| Instead you're just talking about a left-wing conspiracy
| to lie to the public in order to take control of the
| government.
|
| Things like that make people suspicious, and make it easy
| for people who don't know the difference between a
| quantum dot[1] and a microchip to misunderstand when Bill
| Gates calls for a national tracking system[2].
|
| 1: (a quantum dot to store medical information beneath
| the skin really was funded by Bill Gates)
|
| https://news.mit.edu/2019/storing-vaccine-history-
| skin-1218
|
| 2:
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattperez/2020/03/18/bill-
| gates...
| kook_throwaway wrote:
| >Instead you're just talking about a left-wing conspiracy
| to lie to the public in order to take control of the
| government.
|
| To take control of the government or for good
| PR/propaganda? Governments have never had any issues
| conspiring and lying to the public, remember when Fauci
| said not to use masks because they didn't help? Or those
| WMDs that we will surely find any day now?
| [deleted]
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| Are you sure this is the right link? I looked at this
| notice, and compared to the previous version from December
| 2020 (https://www.terviseamet.ee/sites/default/files/MSO/20
| 20_ohut...) and they appear broadly similar... there's
| perhaps a bit more upfront on the need to deal with weakly
| positive results, but they both tell you to read your
| device IFU and adjust your thresholds accordingly.
| xyzzy21 wrote:
| Probably changed post-publication. That's a super common
| thing now. And why you always need to both use an
| archiver site and possibly save a local copy.
| javagram wrote:
| Rather than speculate why didn't you just do a google
| search? A quick google and check of archive.org finds the
| document released in December with an archive date of dec
| 16.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20201216033740/https://www.ne
| ws-...
| themark wrote:
| When I bring this up in conversations with people they make
| me feel like a kook. I am not sure what to think anymore.
| wut2doobiedo wrote:
| Because what to do is highly variable doesn't mean we
| need to take unnecessary risk to know literal truth.
|
| Urban area population density requires different
| mitigations than rural, except rural communities rely on
| urban ones as logistics pipelines.
|
| So normalize; mask up, stay home. Prefer all gas, no
| brakes, based on stats? There may not be enough real
| people to keep the internet on later.
|
| Nothing about the lockdown was for saving you or me
| specifically, but systems of behavior we rely on.
| [deleted]
| nradov wrote:
| That isn't a valid reason. The infection fatality rate
| for most people who keep the Internet running is way less
| than 1%.
|
| https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-
| scena...
| simonh wrote:
| For me this is interesting, but not really material to
| anything. Sure, the tests we have for this new virus have
| needed to be adjusted and calibrated as we learn more
| about it. It's unfortunate if the numbers are a bit
| messed up, it would be better if they were more accurate,
| but real life is messy.
|
| I don't think you're a kook, and I can only guess what
| those people were thinking. Maybe they just wondered...
| and therefore, what?
| kook_throwaway wrote:
| Abusing high cycle thresholds for false positives isn't a
| new strategy.
|
| PCR inventor Kary Mullis is on video calling Fauci out
| for doing exactly that. Unfortunately I can't even link
| the two videos because they keep getting memory holed. If
| you search around you might get lucky, otherwise I'll
| upload my saved copy when I get off work.
| javagram wrote:
| Note that the background for this is that Kary Mullis
| believed AIDS wasn't caused by HIV and was therefore
| angry at Fauci and the entire medical/scientific
| establishment for linking HIV and AIDS. He died in 2019
| so his criticisms of Fauci were related to HIV, not SARS-
| CoV-2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis#Views_on
| _HIV/AIDS_...
| themark wrote:
| The video they are referring to has a very specific part
| about pcr testing (relevant to the discussion here). I
| think it is reasonable to trust his opinion on the matter
| regardless of what he thinks about AIDS.
| briefcomment wrote:
| He is also a Nobel laureate.
| mizzack wrote:
| It didn't help that the WHO released the updated
| guidelines the day Biden was inaugurated.
|
| For that reason alone it became another thought-
| terminating political topic -- you're either dismissed as
| a conspiracy theorist for correlating these events, or
| you're dismissing the value of the vaccine
| rollout/lockdowns/other measures, or you're a sheep
| following the dominant media narrative.
| vmception wrote:
| Things that occur after the election, such as changing
| testing standards, do not affect the election
|
| so what does correlating these events have to do with
| anything while ignoring verifiable causation, such as the
| WHO already having documents about these changes going
| back to September 2020
| beerandt wrote:
| It's harder to dismiss when you also consider the first
| vaccine approvals kept getting delayed until they were
| released immediately after the election.
| javagram wrote:
| Note that it was hardly "delayed" since all initial
| predictions for the vaccine to be approved were around 12
| months, in the end it only took about 10 months.
|
| Reports last year indicated Trump's own FDA was
| responsible for setting out the needed time for data
| gathering and review that pushed it into mid-November.
| https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/white-house-okays-fda-
| months...
|
| Meanwhile other countries including China and Russia
| didn't approve their own vaccines faster, seeming to
| indicate the timeline had little to do with U.S.
| politics.
| jimmygrapes wrote:
| It is worth considering that maybe Sinovac (and whatever
| the Russian one(s) is/are called) may have been released
| far earlier than they would have been if the U.S. and
| others had not developed their own faster. Think of space
| wars - even if you lose the race to first, you still want
| to be in 2nd vs 500th. If they were developed at a more
| traditional pace, would they be more effective? Would any
| of them be? And what would be the consequences of
| waiting? Would it be millions more deaths, or would
| natural herd immunity emerge? Both? Would the more
| virulent variants have appeared without a marginally
| effective strain evolving as a result of marginally
| effective vaccines?
| kook_throwaway wrote:
| That definitely smelled like an intentional muddying of
| the waters.
| timr wrote:
| Yep. It was stunning to me that this was rarely mentioned
| in the press.
| ssully wrote:
| Please correct me if I am wrong, but I feel like you are
| trying to say more with "but then 'cases' became some kind of
| top-line media metric".
|
| Should cases not be an important metric for people to know?
| analyte123 wrote:
| I think his point is that having a minute amount (possibly
| non-viable) of viral DNA in your respiratory tract does not
| necessarily make you a true "case" in terms of being
| actively infected with the virus.
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| He's saying the definition of cases in 'actual science' vs
| 'the media' is different.
|
| Not a shocker that the media would sensationalize things.
|
| Science and PCR amplification... has a much looser
| definition with the possibility for much more false
| positives with such small number of cycles of
| amplification.
|
| It was done ostensibly for cautionary purposes but the
| media seized on it and painted red death map visualizations
| for people to see with inflated death counts.
| javagram wrote:
| > red death map visualizations for people to see with
| inflated death counts.
|
| There is no indication of inflated death counts. Death
| counts from covid correlate closely with excess deaths.
|
| Some have claimed that deaths did rise but because of
| lockdowns, however in "locked down" regions where
| reported Covid cases and deaths were low, so were excess
| deaths.
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| If you inflate infections, you are therefore are also
| inflating deaths, it's a 1 to X correlation.
| ssully wrote:
| I understand that. But I would hardly call it
| sensationalizing. It's a mixture of the best of what we
| had at the time (others have posted talking about how the
| tests have changed/improved), and the fact that reporting
| on things in a simple and straight forward manner is hard
| because people simply don't have the time, or don't give
| a shit about nuance.
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| It's looking like the reported numbers may be over-
| estimated by one or more orders of magnitude....that's
| the definition of sensational.
| mistermann wrote:
| I suspect that a pattern of not disclosing that
| statistics that are implied to be factual are actually to
| some degree ~estimates contributed to the extreme level
| of polarization over "facts" and "the science", as well
| as the increasing distrust of the media. Sure, most
| people don't consider these things too logically, but
| then if those distributing the facts can't be bothered
| either, how shall we accurately assign blame for the
| final outcome?
| kook_throwaway wrote:
| >how shall we accurately assign blame for the final
| outcome?
|
| That's a feature not a bug.
| ianhawes wrote:
| Prior to the vaccine rollout (at least in the US), positive
| cases were used as a metric for public health officials to
| gauge whether the virus was spreading, whether containment
| efforts were effective, and how to manage the presumable
| change in hospitalizations and fatalities.
|
| As vaccination efforts have rolled out, there is still a
| relationship between positive cases and deaths, however the
| ratio of cases to deaths has dropped dramatically.
|
| If you Google "uk covid cases" and flip between new cases
| and deaths you will notice that the "2nd wave" in
| December/January had an increase in deaths 2 weeks after
| the increase in cases. The "3rd wave" has had a large
| increase in cases but no resulting massive increase in
| deaths.
|
| The only metric the public should be concerned about is
| whether they have or have not been vaccinated.
| forcry wrote:
| >The only metric the public should be concerned about is
| whether they have or have not been vaccinated.
|
| That would be quite stupid. Because if the risk of the
| disease is low, vaccines does not make sense when you do
| risk/benefit calculation.
|
| Hence the people should know about the cases.
|
| Of course, instead, if you are looking to push vaccines
| no matter what, you would say something like
|
| >The only metric the public should be concerned about is
| whether they have or have not been vaccinated.
| ianhawes wrote:
| > That would be quite stupid. Because if the risk of the
| disease is low, vaccines does not make sense when you do
| risk/benefit calculation.
|
| The risk of symptomatic illness is low if you are
| vaccinated. The risk of symptomatic illness is high if
| you are unvaccinated. The risk of death is high if you
| are unvaccinated and have pre-existing conditions and are
| under the age of 65. The risk of death is very high if
| you are unvaccinated and over the age of 65.
| nradov wrote:
| Regardless of number of cases, most of us will be exposed
| to SARS-CoV-2 eventually. Just like with other endemic
| coronaviruses such as HCoV-OC43.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| "A further 43 per cent were made within two days of admission,
| with 13 per cent made in the days and weeks that followed,
| including those likely to have caught the virus in hospital."
|
| While I'm glad that they're looking at this, it seems less
| shocking than at first glance. This looks like 13 percent of
| those who are currently listed as Covid hospitalisations, were
| actually there for other reasons. Of the rest, nearly half had
| not bothered to get a covid-19 PCR test before going to the
| hospital.
|
| Given that this group is (we know from other sources) quite
| disproportionately from those who did not get vaccinated, is this
| surprising at all? They're people who for whatever reason shun
| interactions with medical procedures until they are in desperate
| straits.
|
| Now, the 13% who were did not test positive until more than a
| couple days after admission, that is something that should be
| investigated. But it wouldn't change the current picture hugely.
| doesnotexist wrote:
| They don't really explain much about that 13%. So it's a bit
| misleading. How many of the 13% tested positive on day 3 for
| example. Testing positive on day 3 would still lead one to
| believe they had contracted covid prior to admission and covid
| illness could be contributing factor to their admission or even
| the primary reason. It seems more that the article wants to
| give the impression that the 13% entirely is comprised of post-
| admission covid positive being retroactively recategorized as
| covid admission. That may be true for some portion of the 13%
| but we have no way to know from this reporting. It's ironic
| that an article criticizing categorization/attribution being
| overly broad to do exactly that with the minority percentage
| that it hangs the entire thrust of its point upon.
| g34lkj45h wrote:
| CDC is fake commmie bullshit.
| lamontcg wrote:
| There is absolutely zero evidence offered to suggest that the
| majority of these cases are people with broken legs who test
| positive.
|
| SARS-CoV-2 causes heart attacks and strokes due to thrombogensis,
| particularly in the younger adults.
|
| If someone strokes, they can be admitted for that and then later
| test positive, and the cause was most likely COVID and counting
| them is essentially accurate.
|
| Since most old people have been vacccinated we are mostly now
| seeing the younger unvaccinated crowd coming down with COVID and
| it isn't very surprising that there's a lot more thrombogensis
| now than ARDS.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| That's a pretty generous interpretation that offers about as
| much evidence as the article does for the opposite.
| beervirus wrote:
| What a shitty headline. Completely obscures the point of the
| article.
| mitjak wrote:
| this seems to suggest there's a lot more undiagnosed cases
| walking around in the wild than we know about.
| makomk wrote:
| Well, yeah, but we knew that already. The UK has been
| monitoring the actual number of people infected with Covid via
| random sampling of the population for well over a year and it's
| always been rather higher than the detected cases, despite
| having a lot more mass testing than other countries.
| hereforphone wrote:
| That's already been established. Many cases are asymptomatic or
| present mild symptoms that won't motivate the ill to seek out a
| test. Testing by country, state (province, etc.), and even
| region varies wildly.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| This was apparent last year from serologic antibody testing.
| The prevalence of antibodies was anywhere between 2-10x what
| we were finding in the tests, which made it pretty obvious
| that way more people had mild COVID than is being reported.
| Unfortunately, if someone picks up a runny nose and mild
| cold-like symptoms and then recovers, it doesn't make the
| news. But if you have a one-in-a-million freak case where a
| 25 year old ends up in the hospital testing positive, it gets
| plastered on every news publication and is repeated ad-
| nauseam even though it is a misrepresentation.
| mitjak wrote:
| right, i'm not making a new claim. i'm saying, that's one of
| the few conclusions we can draw from this data. it doesn't
| say anything about e.g. catching covid at the hospital,
| whether existing data on health consequences and mortality is
| less relevant, or that "covid is mild / just a flu" as some
| people seem to be concluding.
| nradov wrote:
| The CDC estimates that only about a quarter of infections are
| officially counted as cases.
|
| https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| Keep going. What does that say about the reported IFR that's
| used to justify lockdowns?
| dm319 wrote:
| I am weary of this newspaper's reporting - they wage a continual
| war on the NHS, and they seem to have some writers paid to
| continually put out negative news on the NHS.
|
| Two points:
|
| 1. COVID-19 is the most thrombogenic infectious disease known to
| man. It likely has a serious impact on co-morbidities in a way
| that hasn't been clearly studied yet. This means it's likely to
| exacerbate current conditions.
|
| 2. Hospitals are full in the UK at the moment. It's not COVID
| numbers, but it's not clear what is causing this. Normally at
| this time in the year bed occupancy is low and elective surgical
| work can proceed, but at the moment elective lists are being
| cancelled due to full ITUs.
| polytely wrote:
| 2. Isn't that from all the rescheduled surgeries and such? I
| know that here in the Netherlands there is still a huge backlog
| of care that couldn't happen when the hospitals were full, that
| has to be caught up on.
| dm319 wrote:
| Sadly the rescheduled care is getting cancelled due to lack
| of ITU beds for post-surgery. I don't know what's going, but
| there seems to be a backlog of complaints that people are
| only now getting investigated, and with increased social
| mixing I guess infectious diseases are going up. Still, it's
| a bit strange to be this overwhelmed at this time if year.
| robocat wrote:
| > Hospitals are full in the UK at the moment.
|
| New Zealand hospitals have been in "crisis" pretty much all
| year, and we have no Covid. Currently it is due to a
| respiratory virus called RSV, but there were severe problems in
| other months too, not due to RSV.
|
| https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=nz+hospitals+overrun+OR+cr...
| johnnyApplePRNG wrote:
| Could it be as simple as baby boomers ageing?
| dm319 wrote:
| Yes, I think other (non-covid) infectious diseases are partly
| to blame. They also have a knock on effect for other
| conditions like coronary heart disease, COPD and dementia,
| etc.
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