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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

#71

Post by GuB-42 »

Another weird trend I picked up reading France reports on the pandemic is that non-Covid nosocomial infections decreased significantly during the pandemic.[1] As if Covid took over antibiotic resistant bacteria (a little) and other infections (a lot).

There is no definite explanation, but mistaking other diseases for Covid is one hypothesis, along with anti-covid rules affecting other diseases.

[1] https://www.santepubliquefrance.fr/media/files/01-maladies-e...

Edit: I don't know why the downvotes (no problem with that), but in case someone thinks it is a conspiracy theory of some kind, Santé publique is an official agency tied to the french ministry of health. The conclusion is of course up to debate but you are unlikely to find better data.

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#72

Post by BoxOfRain »

rocgf wrote: post #59
BoxOfRain wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 staf…

> 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.

There's enough private healthcare interests with links to the Conservative Party to at least make it worth raising an eyebrow in my opinion. I'm not making any specific allegations but it wouldn't be the first time Conservative Party ministers got in bed with private interests, the PPE scandal of last year comes to mind for example.

You're right of course though, passive incompetence is probably more likely than active malice.

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#73

Post by willyt »

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.

I haven't checked this as the full data the article was based on wasn't given in the article, but it wouldn't make much sense to count out-patients as part of the covid hospitalisation statistics, so I imagine that the word "hospitalisation" means in-patients specifically i.e. people who are sick enough to stay in a bed in a ward for a night or more, so things like pink-eye, fractures, even child birth (without complications) wouldn't count.

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#74

Post by apercu »

beerandt wrote: post #68
mizzack wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

On inauguration day.

Sure, and it could be political. In fact, most things of this nature are at that level. So, maybe, the people in charge didn't like the previous US government admin so they didn't help improve its numbers.

That is certainly more likely and believable than some vast left-wing conspiracy to implant Bill Gate's microchips in to your iPhone carrying ass to "track" you.

:)

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#75

Post by puppet-master »

BoxOfRain wrote: post #53
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.

>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 staf…

> comically dysfunctional

intentionally dysfunctional.. there has been a multi-decade effort to prep the NHS essentially for complete privatization

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#77

Post by a9h74j »

sokoloff wrote: post #42
bananapub wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what suggests to you that there is any notable number of false positives?

Primarily that "all lab tests have errors" and if you test everyone who is hospitalized for any reason (which is sensible), you're inevitably going to get some false positives. Secondarily, in any low-incidence scenario (such as might be the case for "COVID infections among the vaccinated"), even high specificity tests have a high false rate among positive tests.

Not an epidemiologist, but prior to Covid I have never seen a professional risk-benefit discussion around screening tests, which did not give serious weight to the various costs of false positives. Patient anxiety. Rounds of invasive biopsies not without risk. Financial costs of the same.

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#78

Post by j_walter »

BoxOfRain wrote: post #72
rocgf wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There's enough private healthcare interests with links to the Conservative Party to at least make it worth raising an eyebrow in my opinion. I'm not making any specific allegations but it wouldn't be the first time Conservative Party ministers got in bed with private interests, the PPE scandal of last year comes to mind for example. You're right of course though, passive incompetence is probably more likely than acti…

> passive incompetence is probably more likely than active malice.

Well this is pretty much the norm at most levels of government around the world. There are no real performance indicators being used to judge accomplishments or effectiveness for most government jobs.

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#79

Post by mizzack »

themark wrote: post #58
mizzack wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

When I bring this up in conversations with people they make me feel like a kook. I am not sure what to think anymore.

It didn't help that the WHO released the updated guidelines the day Biden was inaugurated.

For that reason alone it became another thought-terminating political topic -- you're either dismissed as a conspiracy theorist for correlating these events, or you're dismissing the value of the vaccine rollout/lockdowns/other measures, or you're a sheep following the dominant media narrative.

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#80

Post by willyt »

pavon wrote: post #56

> Experts said it meant the national statistics, published daily on the government website and frequently referred to by ministers, may far overstate the levels of pressures on the NHS. I don't understand this part. Isn't the important number here the total number of people in the hospital (or ICU or other ward) relative to the total number that the hospital (or ICU or other ward) can accommodate? Or alternatively, t…

> I don't understand this part. Isn't the important number here the total number of people in the hospital (or ICU or other ward) relative to the total number that the hospital (or ICU or other ward) can accommodate? Or alternatively, the total excess relative to normal years.

I agree with this point and the article doesn't seem to mention this, surely the important statistic is number of in-patients per week comparing week by week with 2019. If it's much higher then there is a big problem regardless of whether these patients have covid or not as we haven't built any significant hospital capacity or trained a lot more medical staff since then.

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