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Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

telegraph.co.uk

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Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#21

Post by rossdavidh »

"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.

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#22

Post by minitoar »

literallyaduck wrote: post #17
peteradio wrote: post #8

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.

"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.

I think OPs point is that this scenario is not the focus or point of the article.

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#23

Post by seriousquestion »

peteradio wrote: post #8

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.

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...

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#24

Post by peteradio »

literallyaduck wrote: post #17
peteradio wrote: post #8

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.

"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.

I should have said, that is not what the article is talking about. This is about miscategorization.

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#25

Post by doesnotexist »

bananapub wrote: post #15
telesilla wrote: post #11

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.

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.

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?

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#27

Post by nerdponx »

literallyaduck wrote: post #17
peteradio wrote: post #8

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.

"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.

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.

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#28

Post by dataflow »

forcry wrote: post #20

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 a…

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...

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#29

Post by doesnotexist »

rossdavidh wrote: post #21

"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…

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.

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#30

Post by rjknight »

doesnotexist wrote: post #25
bananapub wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

"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.

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