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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

#81

Post by dm319 »

I am weary of this newspaper's reporting - they wage a continual war on the NHS, and they seem to have some writers paid to continually put out negative news on the NHS.

Two points:

1. COVID-19 is the most thrombogenic infectious disease known to man. It likely has a serious impact on co-morbidities in a way that hasn't been clearly studied yet. This means it's likely to exacerbate current conditions.

2. Hospitals are full in the UK at the moment. It's not COVID numbers, but it's not clear what is causing this. Normally at this time in the year bed occupancy is low and elective surgical work can proceed, but at the moment elective lists are being cancelled due to full ITUs.

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#82

Post by simonh »

cwp wrote: post #46
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.

Yeah, those are the right questions. The point of the article is that people who go to the hospital for non-Covid reasons - eg, broken leg, heart attack, cancer - and then test positive are being counted as "hospitalized with Covid" even though they don't have a severe case. So the statistics are being skewed. We don't really know by how much, because the article doesn't say how many went to the hospital for Covid-re…

Well, the you've got to differentiate what are covid related symptoms and what aren't. A lot of people with Covid, as with many such diseases, actually die of something else. Hence the "nobody ever died of covid, it was all because of pre-existing conditions" conspiracy theory.

The fact is it probably doesn't matter all that much. Anyway who gets to decide what is covid related or not? How do you ensure consistent application of selection criteria across teams and hospitals?

When your hospitals are filling to capacity with wheezing, coughing patients on ventilators the fact your numbers are off by a bit is by the by, and your medical staff have enough to deal with.

Anyway wouldn't this policy over-count patients who'd got vaccinated, went to hospital for an unrelated reason, but then tested positive for covid? After all, you can still catch covid if you're vaccinated, you just get to fight it off quicker. Most likely the statistical impact of all these factors isn't all that much though.

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#83

Post by makomk »

mitjak wrote: post #26

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

Well, yeah, but we knew that already. The UK has been monitoring the actual number of people infected with Covid via random sampling of the population for well over a year and it's always been rather higher than the detected cases, despite having a lot more mass testing than other countries.

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#84

Post by simonh »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #49
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.

More actual questions: - how soon after exposure do you test positive (eg. if they went to the hospital, tested negative, then tested positive later there - were they undetectably positive on the first test, or did they catch it in the hospital). - Why do we not separate hospitalized "by" and "with" covid (and same for deaths). If half of the hospitalized are there because of broken legs and appendicitis, they'd be t…

Half the patients in hospitals over-run with covid patients are not there with broken legs and appendicitis. That's absurd. The numbers of such people are going to be reasonably well understood.

This is why excess hospitalisations and deaths compared to seasonal norms are used as a reality check on the test numbers. Newspaper headlines might trumped specific numbers that are attention grabbing, but actual policy is driven by an assessment of all the available data.

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#85

Post by tonyedgecombe »

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.

A former health secretary (Jeremy Hunt) co-authored a book that laid out this exact strategy.

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#86

Post by ssully »

nickthemagicman wrote: post #67
ssully wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please correct me if I am wrong, but I feel like you are trying to say more with "but then 'cases' became some kind of top-line media metric". Should cases not be an important metric for people to know?

He's saying the definition of cases in 'actual science' vs 'the media' is different. Not a shocker that the media would sensationalize things. Science and PCR amplification... has a much looser definition with the possibility for much more false positives with such small number of cycles of amplification. It was done ostensibly for cautionary purposes but the media seized on it and painted red death map visualization…

I understand that. But I would hardly call it sensationalizing. It's a mixture of the best of what we had at the time (others have posted talking about how the tests have changed/improved), and the fact that reporting on things in a simple and straight forward manner is hard because people simply don't have the time, or don't give a shit about nuance.

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#87

Post by [deleted] »

j_walter wrote: post #78
BoxOfRain wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#88

Post by oceanplexian »

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.

This was apparent last year from serologic antibody testing. The prevalence of antibodies was anywhere between 2-10x what we were finding in the tests, which made it pretty obvious that way more people had mild COVID than is being reported. Unfortunately, if someone picks up a runny nose and mild cold-like symptoms and then recovers, it doesn't make the news. But if you have a one-in-a-million freak case where a 25 year old ends up in the hospital testing positive, it gets plastered on every news publication and is repeated ad-nauseam even though it is a misrepresentation.

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#89

Post by 74d-fe6-2c6 »

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…

this is at the heart of what "Covidiots", "Querdenker" and other tin foil hat people have been saying for more than a year ... just b/c you find a single virus or a part of it somewhere doesn't mean anything. but ... LOCKDOWN! and think of the children!

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#90

Post by cameldrv »

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…

At the latest low point in the epidemic, some areas were seeing test positivity rates of under 0.5%. If false positives were a large portion of positives, this would seem to be impossible.
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