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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
by 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 agoWell, 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.