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Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

126 points by mrfusion 5y ago

neonate 5y ago
https://archive.is/N4cO6 https://archive.is/N4cO6
fidesomnes 5y ago
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.
senectus1 5y ago
hmmm is this a new variant? or have they got bad testing processes outside of hospitals? So many things this might be...
- sokoloff 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
    what suggests to you that there is any notable number of false positives?
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        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 5y ago
        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 5y ago
  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.
  - senectus1 5y ago
    >The vaccine is rendering infected people asymptomatic. woo didn't think of that. that would be not so great if still infectious.
ck2 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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-and-a-class-how-the-coronavirus-is-spread-through-the-air.html https://english.elpais.com/society/2020-10-28/a-room-a-bar-a...
literallyaduck 5y ago
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.
- jdavis703 5y ago
  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.
  - literallyaduck 5y ago
    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.
  - a9h74j 5y ago
    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.
- bartread 5y ago
  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 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.
peteradio 5y ago
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.
- raziel2p 5y ago
  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.
  - snegu 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      > 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.
  - jaywalk 5y ago
    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.
telesilla 5y ago
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.
- bananapub 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      "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 5y ago
        Tory is still an insult in Ireland. Probably Scotland too.
    - skywhopper 5y ago
      That happened 150 years ago. Today, “Tory” is another name for a member of the Conservative Party.
CorrectHorseBat 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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-from-covid-19-in-england-a-statistical-anomaly/ 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.
doesnotexist 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - doesnotexist 5y ago
    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.
forcry 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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-result https://medical.mit.edu/covid-19-updates/2020/11/pcr-test-re...
  - killjoywashere 5y ago
    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 5y ago
rossdavidh 5y ago
"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 5y ago
  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.
mitjak 5y ago
this seems to suggest there's a lot more undiagnosed cases walking around in the wild than we know about.
- hereforphone 5y ago
  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.
  - mitjak 5y ago
    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.
  - oceanplexian 5y ago
    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.
- makomk 5y ago
  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.
- TechBro8615 5y ago
  Keep going. What does that say about the reported IFR that’s used to justify lockdowns?
mavhc 5y ago
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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- cwp 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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.
- ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  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.
fffwaew 5y ago
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-gain-of-function-research-on-viruses.html 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 5y ago
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.
pavon 5y ago
> 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.
- simonh 5y ago
  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 5y ago
  > 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.
- beerandt 5y ago
  "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".
GuB-42 5y ago
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-et-traumatismes/infections-associees-aux-soins-et-resistance-aux-antibiotiques/infections-associees-aux-soins/lettre-du-signalement-avril-2021 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, Santé 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 5y ago
  You're going against the narrative, your data and your ideas don't matter no matter how legitimate they are. So you get downvotes.
g34lkj45h 5y ago
CDC is fake commmie bullshit.
dm319 5y ago
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.
- robocat 5y ago
  > 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+crisis+OR+overloaded https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=nz+hospitals+overrun+OR+cr...
  - dm319 5y ago
    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.
  - johnnyApplePRNG 5y ago
    Could it be as simple as baby boomers ageing?
    - robocat 5y ago
      Well, the RSV problem affects babies the worst. I have a friend who’s baby is in hospital due to RSV: very worrying. https://www.health.govt.nz/your-health/conditions-and-treatments/diseases-and-illnesses/respiratory-syncytial-virus-rsv https://www.health.govt.nz/your-health/conditions-and-treatm... Note that one theory is that the RSV wave is due to relaxing rules on contact, hand cleaning, and mask usage.
beervirus 5y ago
What a shitty headline. Completely obscures the point of the article.
jojo2000 5y ago
This pandemic is a lie. Get over it and act accordingly.
robocat 5y ago
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.
- robocat 5y ago
  Actual UK population infection number is ~ 1.5% - see studies referenced by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28037172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28037172
throwitaway1235 5y ago
Question if it's even possible to answer. How does the average cycle count for a Covid-19 test compare to a flu test?
lamontcg 5y ago
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 5y ago
  That’s a pretty generous interpretation that offers about as much evidence as the article does for the opposite.
vmception 5y ago
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.
fabbari 5y ago
Great journalism at work here! So - the expectation is that people with symptoms of Covid19 would be tested before being hospitalized? I am actually impressed that 44% were. It would be standard operating procedure for an hospital receiving a patient showing symptoms to give a test. In fact 88% received the test results within two days of hospitalization. I am still waiting for an explanation of ICU occupancy [0] if it wasn't for Covid 19. [0] https://www.statista.com/chart/23746/icu-bed-occupancy-rates-in-us-hospital-areas/ https://www.statista.com/chart/23746/icu-bed-occupancy-rates...
- dm319 5y ago
  As someone who works in the NHS, I would also like to know. My trust has hit full capacity yesterday for the second time in two weeks. Another trust I work for had full ITU capacity and has had to cancel elective surgery. According to more senior clinical staff the hospital is full of genuinely sick people.
  - native_samples 5y ago
    But that's inevitable. The NHS runs at close to capacity in normal times, but there has been a period of over a year now when people were being told to avoid going to hospital, to stay isolated at home, when doctors were not seeing patients. I am actually more surprised that you are surprised. The NHS has collapsed: waiting lists are now so long there is no way they will ever drain except by people simply dying due to lack of treatment. You should expect all hospitals to be completely full from this point on, as a natural consequence of lockdowns (ironically, the thing the lockdowns were supposed to avoid).
    - dm319 5y ago
      I don't think it is off topic for me to say that your comment is arrogant with statements that are either incorrect or make a lot of assumptions. Maybe throw in a bit of schadenfreude in too. I think the style of discourse here colours the discussion, and your comment is a statement rather than a discussion. I certainly saw patients over the past year - at no point did I stop. My patients were grateful that the hospital steered away from a dysfunctional breakdown, which allowed us to keep running our day unit and ward to treat our cancer patients. There were a couple of points where local hospitals became overwhelmed, and the diversion to our hospital threatened to overwhelm us as well. I would say the lockdowns allowed us to treat our patients during this last year. The certainty in your belief that the lockdown has resulted in hospitals being full (?forever) makes several assumptions. There are other explanations, and my personal hunch is it is something to do with spread of infectious diseases with social restriction easing.
onecommentman 5y ago
I decided from the beginning to only focus on COVID deaths, and maybe intubation rates. Everything other measure seemed too fuzzy and ripe for manipulation. Death is a pretty definitive finding. But even this death metric is fraught with issues of “death from COVID” v. “death with COVID”. Deaths among the elderly are often ascribed to just “old age”…nobody cared about exact root causes until COVID came along. Most of the fatalities came from the “under-forensic-ed” elderly population and (I read somewhere…source needed) hospitals got increased financial compensation if a patient was coded as a COVID patient. Who is doing the forensics and what is their motivation? So even assigning a cause of death by COVID is a mess, but less than the mess of defining “COVID cases”. Modulo the “cause of death” issue, fortunately, for COVID deaths, the CDC has a nice website that presents the relevant National and State data https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm Ignore the silly “red +” over the data — just compare the deaths by week (in blue bars) to the expected deaths (as presented by the orange line). (Any “statistically significant” overage gets a “red +” no matter how trivial the excess, so it distorts the essential trends. And the height of the “red +” over the data is the same no matter if it is one death over or 1000 deaths over the threshold for that week. Really questionable chart design veering into “lying with statistics” territory.)
- derkster 5y ago
  I do the same. It's extremely sad to know the United States has lost more people to this than every war casualty since the Civil War.
fabbari 5y ago
Wow - I was re-reading the article, and it jumped on my face: "The breakdown of daily Covid hospital diagnoses shows that of more than 780 hospitalizations dated last Thursday...with 13 per cent made in the days and weeks that followed" Can we say that 13% was definitely tested in "days" not "weeks" since last Thursday? So their: "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." At worst would indicate 13% misdiagnosed Covid cases, with the word "belatedly" doing a lot of lifting. I thought this article was bad - but the more I read it the more it looks like a pile of journalistic manure.

126 points by mrfusion 5y ago

https://archive.is/N4cO6 https://archive.is/N4cO6

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.

senectus1 5y ago

hmmm is this a new variant? or have they got bad testing processes outside of hospitals? So many things this might be...

sokoloff 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
  what suggests to you that there is any notable number of false positives?
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        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 5y ago
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.
- senectus1 5y ago
  >The vaccine is rendering infected people asymptomatic. woo didn't think of that. that would be not so great if still infectious.

ck2 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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-and-a-class-how-the-coronavirus-is-spread-through-the-air.html https://english.elpais.com/society/2020-10-28/a-room-a-bar-a...

literallyaduck 5y ago

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.

jdavis703 5y ago
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.
- literallyaduck 5y ago
  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.
- a9h74j 5y ago
  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.
bartread 5y ago
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 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.

peteradio 5y ago

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.

raziel2p 5y ago
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.
- snegu 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    > 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.
- jaywalk 5y ago
  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.

telesilla 5y ago

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.

bananapub 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    "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 5y ago
      Tory is still an insult in Ireland. Probably Scotland too.
  - skywhopper 5y ago
    That happened 150 years ago. Today, “Tory” is another name for a member of the Conservative Party.

CorrectHorseBat 5y ago

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 5y ago
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-from-covid-19-in-england-a-statistical-anomaly/ 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.

doesnotexist 5y ago

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 5y ago
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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- doesnotexist 5y ago
  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.

forcry 5y ago

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 5y ago
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-result https://medical.mit.edu/covid-19-updates/2020/11/pcr-test-re...
- killjoywashere 5y ago
  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 5y ago

rossdavidh 5y ago

"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 5y ago
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.

mitjak 5y ago

this seems to suggest there's a lot more undiagnosed cases walking around in the wild than we know about.

hereforphone 5y ago
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.
- mitjak 5y ago
  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.
- oceanplexian 5y ago
  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.
makomk 5y ago
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.
TechBro8615 5y ago
Keep going. What does that say about the reported IFR that’s used to justify lockdowns?

mavhc 5y ago

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.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
cwp 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.
ajsnigrutin 5y ago
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.

fffwaew 5y ago

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-gain-of-function-research-on-viruses.html 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 5y ago

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.

pavon 5y ago

> 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.

simonh 5y ago
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 5y ago
> 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.
beerandt 5y ago
"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".

GuB-42 5y ago

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-et-traumatismes/infections-associees-aux-soins-et-resistance-aux-antibiotiques/infections-associees-aux-soins/lettre-du-signalement-avril-2021 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, Santé 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 5y ago
You're going against the narrative, your data and your ideas don't matter no matter how legitimate they are. So you get downvotes.

g34lkj45h 5y ago

CDC is fake commmie bullshit.

dm319 5y ago

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.

robocat 5y ago
> 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+crisis+OR+overloaded https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=nz+hospitals+overrun+OR+cr...
- dm319 5y ago
  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.
- johnnyApplePRNG 5y ago
  Could it be as simple as baby boomers ageing?
  - robocat 5y ago
    Well, the RSV problem affects babies the worst. I have a friend who’s baby is in hospital due to RSV: very worrying. https://www.health.govt.nz/your-health/conditions-and-treatments/diseases-and-illnesses/respiratory-syncytial-virus-rsv https://www.health.govt.nz/your-health/conditions-and-treatm... Note that one theory is that the RSV wave is due to relaxing rules on contact, hand cleaning, and mask usage.

beervirus 5y ago

What a shitty headline. Completely obscures the point of the article.

jojo2000 5y ago

This pandemic is a lie. Get over it and act accordingly.

robocat 5y ago

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.

robocat 5y ago
Actual UK population infection number is ~ 1.5% - see studies referenced by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28037172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28037172

throwitaway1235 5y ago

Question if it's even possible to answer. How does the average cycle count for a Covid-19 test compare to a flu test?

lamontcg 5y ago

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 5y ago
That’s a pretty generous interpretation that offers about as much evidence as the article does for the opposite.

vmception 5y ago

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.

fabbari 5y ago

Great journalism at work here! So - the expectation is that people with symptoms of Covid19 would be tested before being hospitalized? I am actually impressed that 44% were. It would be standard operating procedure for an hospital receiving a patient showing symptoms to give a test. In fact 88% received the test results within two days of hospitalization. I am still waiting for an explanation of ICU occupancy [0] if it wasn't for Covid 19. [0] https://www.statista.com/chart/23746/icu-bed-occupancy-rates-in-us-hospital-areas/ https://www.statista.com/chart/23746/icu-bed-occupancy-rates...

dm319 5y ago
As someone who works in the NHS, I would also like to know. My trust has hit full capacity yesterday for the second time in two weeks. Another trust I work for had full ITU capacity and has had to cancel elective surgery. According to more senior clinical staff the hospital is full of genuinely sick people.
- native_samples 5y ago
  But that's inevitable. The NHS runs at close to capacity in normal times, but there has been a period of over a year now when people were being told to avoid going to hospital, to stay isolated at home, when doctors were not seeing patients. I am actually more surprised that you are surprised. The NHS has collapsed: waiting lists are now so long there is no way they will ever drain except by people simply dying due to lack of treatment. You should expect all hospitals to be completely full from this point on, as a natural consequence of lockdowns (ironically, the thing the lockdowns were supposed to avoid).
  - dm319 5y ago
    I don't think it is off topic for me to say that your comment is arrogant with statements that are either incorrect or make a lot of assumptions. Maybe throw in a bit of schadenfreude in too. I think the style of discourse here colours the discussion, and your comment is a statement rather than a discussion. I certainly saw patients over the past year - at no point did I stop. My patients were grateful that the hospital steered away from a dysfunctional breakdown, which allowed us to keep running our day unit and ward to treat our cancer patients. There were a couple of points where local hospitals became overwhelmed, and the diversion to our hospital threatened to overwhelm us as well. I would say the lockdowns allowed us to treat our patients during this last year. The certainty in your belief that the lockdown has resulted in hospitals being full (?forever) makes several assumptions. There are other explanations, and my personal hunch is it is something to do with spread of infectious diseases with social restriction easing.

onecommentman 5y ago

I decided from the beginning to only focus on COVID deaths, and maybe intubation rates. Everything other measure seemed too fuzzy and ripe for manipulation. Death is a pretty definitive finding. But even this death metric is fraught with issues of “death from COVID” v. “death with COVID”. Deaths among the elderly are often ascribed to just “old age”…nobody cared about exact root causes until COVID came along. Most of the fatalities came from the “under-forensic-ed” elderly population and (I read somewhere…source needed) hospitals got increased financial compensation if a patient was coded as a COVID patient. Who is doing the forensics and what is their motivation? So even assigning a cause of death by COVID is a mess, but less than the mess of defining “COVID cases”. Modulo the “cause of death” issue, fortunately, for COVID deaths, the CDC has a nice website that presents the relevant National and State data https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm Ignore the silly “red +” over the data — just compare the deaths by week (in blue bars) to the expected deaths (as presented by the orange line). (Any “statistically significant” overage gets a “red +” no matter how trivial the excess, so it distorts the essential trends. And the height of the “red +” over the data is the same no matter if it is one death over or 1000 deaths over the threshold for that week. Really questionable chart design veering into “lying with statistics” territory.)

derkster 5y ago
I do the same. It's extremely sad to know the United States has lost more people to this than every war casualty since the Civil War.

fabbari 5y ago

Wow - I was re-reading the article, and it jumped on my face: "The breakdown of daily Covid hospital diagnoses shows that of more than 780 hospitalizations dated last Thursday...with 13 per cent made in the days and weeks that followed" Can we say that 13% was definitely tested in "days" not "weeks" since last Thursday? So their: "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." At worst would indicate 13% misdiagnosed Covid cases, with the word "belatedly" doing a lot of lifting. I thought this article was bad - but the more I read it the more it looks like a pile of journalistic manure.