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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

#31

Post by skywhopper »

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?

That happened 150 years ago. Today, “Tory” is another name for a member of the Conservative Party.

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#32

Post by hereforphone »

mitjak wrote: post #26

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

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.

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#33

Post by mitjak »

hereforphone wrote: post #32
mitjak wrote: post #26

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

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.

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.

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#34

Post by timr »

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…

> 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...

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#35

Post by mavhc »

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.

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#36

Post by literallyaduck »

jdavis703 wrote: post #19
literallyaduck wrote: post #7

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.

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.

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.

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#37

Post by timr »

doesnotexist wrote: post #18

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.

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.

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#38

Post by bellyfullofbac »

jdavis703 wrote: post #9
ck2 wrote: post #5

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.

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.

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...

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#39

Post by mizzack »

timr wrote: post #34
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…

> 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…

> 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...

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#40

Post by [deleted] »

mavhc wrote: post #35

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]
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