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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

#91

Post by [deleted] »

wut2doobiedo wrote: post #65
themark wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Because what to do is highly variable doesn’t mean we need to take unnecessary risk to know literal truth. Urban area population density requires different mitigations than rural, except rural communities rely on urban ones as logistics pipelines. So normalize; mask up, stay home. Prefer all gas, no brakes, based on stats? There may not be enough real people to keep the internet on later. Nothing about the lockdown w…

[deleted]

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#93

Post by dragonwriter »

cameldrv wrote: post #90
timr wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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.

Its quite possible, especially if there is a testing bias toward people who are less likely to have the disease

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#94

Post by makomk »

seriousquestion wrote: post #23
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 “coloniz…

The trouble is that there's this unfortunate tendency to try and deal with this by having different standards for what gets counted as a covid case depending on whether the person's vaccinated - either by testing vaccinated people less as suggested in that article or by interpreting the test results differently. Which makes all statistics about the proportion of people who catch Covid, are hospitalized with it, etc who are vaccinated complete and utter garbage - at that point you're not finding Covid cases amongst vaccinated people simply because you're not looking. It resulted in initial numbers out of Israel that seem to have wildly overstated vaccine effectiveness against current variants, and I suspect the same might be happening in the USA right now.

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#95

Post by derbOac »

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.

Am American, not UK, but have worked in hospitals and surrounded by family working in hospitals during the pandemic.

This is a grey area here, because people don't always "come in because of COVID," they come in for symptom X, which might be exacerbated or caused by COVID. If someone has a set of chronic diseases, sure they have that, but the question is "why did they come into the ED today?" The answer to that is sometimes COVID even though they didn't know it. How this looks on a hospital chart is really fuzzy because it depends on all kinds of things; ICD coding can be ambiguous.

There's also been some cases of COVID contracted in the hospital (the ones I have person familiarity with), but that is much less rare, and rarer as the year has gone on.

There are also cases of people coming in for reasons unrelated to COVID, and finding out they were positive just coincidentally.

There's also cases where it's really unclear.

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#96

Post by leereeves »

apercu wrote: post #74
beerandt wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :)

Instead you're just talking about a left-wing conspiracy to lie to the public in order to take control of the government.

Things like that make people suspicious, and make it easy for people who don't know the difference between a quantum dot[1] and a microchip to misunderstand when Bill Gates calls for a national tracking system[2].

1: (a quantum dot to store medical information beneath the skin really was funded by Bill Gates)

https://news.mit.edu/2019/storing-vaccine-history-skin-1218

2: https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattperez/2020/03/18/bill-gates...

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#97

Post by simpleguitar »

jaywalk wrote: post #50
raziel2p wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, they may be catching covid in hospitals, there's no way to know for sure, but it seems unlikely to account for all these cases. But yeah this is going to be picked up by covid-deniers as more "proof" that covid is exaggarated.

I don't think "Covid deniers" make up any significant percentage of the population, but that doesn't change the fact that this is proof that Covid is exaggerated.

I think covid deniers do make up a significant percentage of the population, and they would take this as proof of exaggeration even though it really isn't.

US has had 1M excess deaths. That's a million people more than usual. http://www.healthdata.org/special-analysis/estimation-excess...

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#98

Post by mistermann »

ssully wrote: post #86
nickthemagicman wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I suspect that a pattern of not disclosing that statistics that are implied to be factual are actually to some degree ~estimates contributed to the extreme level of polarization over "facts" and "the science", as well as the increasing distrust of the media. Sure, most people don't consider these things too logically, but then if those distributing the facts can't be bothered either, how shall we accurately assign blame for the final outcome?

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#99

Post by ianhawes »

ssully wrote: post #60
timr wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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?

Prior to the vaccine rollout (at least in the US), positive cases were used as a metric for public health officials to gauge whether the virus was spreading, whether containment efforts were effective, and how to manage the presumable change in hospitalizations and fatalities.

As vaccination efforts have rolled out, there is still a relationship between positive cases and deaths, however the ratio of cases to deaths has dropped dramatically.

If you Google "uk covid cases" and flip between new cases and deaths you will notice that the "2nd wave" in December/January had an increase in deaths 2 weeks after the increase in cases. The "3rd wave" has had a large increase in cases but no resulting massive increase in deaths.

The only metric the public should be concerned about is whether they have or have not been vaccinated.

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#100

Post by rory »

seriousquestion wrote: post #23
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 “coloniz…

> in today’s world of routine coronavirus testing of vaccinated people

It's worth noting that the CDC is explicitly telling people not to do this:

If you’ve been around someone who has COVID-19, you do not need to stay away from others or get tested unless you have symptoms. (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/fully-vac...)

Agreed that people are still doing it though. That seems reasonable to me given the mixed data around to what degree the vaccine prevents spread.

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