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 t

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.