Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

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.

>why are people going into hospital without having a Covid test first (assuming non emergency)

The truth is that once you put aside the creepy fawning nationalism around the NHS it's actually got some serious systemic issues that never get properly resolved because it's a political football. It's not "joined up" very well at all, at least in my experience paperwork cockups are pretty much universal. The clinical staff are fantastic for the most part but the way it's administered and organised is almost comically dysfunctional. It's damn-near impossible to actually pin down an NHS service to a concrete date or time to get anything done in my experience, in some cases you just get ignored unless you specifically know that you have to chase them up yourself. I ended up going private at my own expense and the conspiracy theorist in me reckons that's probably the ultimate aim: let the service rot to the point anyone who can afford it will jump ship for the private sector.

I have a lot of respect for the people on the ground at the NHS, lions led by donkeys indeed.

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.

To a less-frequent degree than with 'cases' the meaning of 'gold-standard' seems to have changed as well, or be starting to. As I understand it, a proper gold-standard test is proven to have essentially 100% correlation to verified clinical symptoms or findings.

> let the service rot to the point anyone who can afford it will jump ship for the private sector

I think that's pretty far-fetched and can't see a good reason for this purposefully being the case. It's just Hanlon's razor, really.