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Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

telegraph.co.uk

131–140 of 241 posts

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#131

Is the Telegraph a paper of good repute? The article feels to me as somehow manipulative however I'm not local to the UK. I am wondering if this is propaganda or if these results are actually plausible.

I mean, it employed Boris Johnson as a columnist; you do the maths.

More seriously, it's a bit of an oddity, really; it's a broadsheet under the normal classification, but certainly has tabloid-y elements.

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#132
post #81

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 ar…

> Hospitals are full in the UK at the moment. New Zealand hospitals have been in “crisis” pretty much all year, and we have no Covid. Currently it is due to a respiratory virus called RSV, but there were severe problems in other months too, not due to RSV. https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=nz+hospitals+overrun+OR+cr...

Could it be as simple as baby boomers ageing?

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#133
There is absolutely zero evidence offered to suggest that the majority of these cases are people with broken legs who test positive.

SARS-CoV-2 causes heart attacks and strokes due to thrombogensis, particularly in the younger adults.

If someone strokes, they can be admitted for that and then later test positive, and the cause was most likely COVID and counting them is essentially accurate.

Since most old people have been vacccinated we are mostly now seeing the younger unvaccinated crowd coming down with COVID and it isn't very surprising that there's a lot more thrombogensis now than ARDS.

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#134
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…

Well if you want to "control public fear" for political and economic gain, you just adjust the CT value as required to bump up the positive rate or to lower it.

Note that the US CDC is using two different CT values: a higher one for unvaccinated and a lower one for vaccinated. That doesn't make any sense until you start thinking Hobbsian/Hegalian/Machiavellian.

If I was wanting to exploit the situation, this is exactly what I'd do. Instead I have ethics however.

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#135
post #34
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…

ANY molecular biologist will tell you that it's NOT.

At 30+ cycles, you are generated false positives off of both everyday Common Cold coronavirus, influenza and probably even bacteria. Literally you are amplifying noise and then calling it a positive.

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#136
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…

Are you sure this is the right link? I looked at this notice, and compared to the previous version from December 2020 ( https://www.terviseamet.ee/sites/default/files/MSO/2020_ohut... ) and they appear broadly similar... there's perhaps a bit more upfront on the need to deal with weakly positive results, but they both tell you to read your device IFU and adjust your thresholds accordingly.

Probably changed post-publication. That's a super common thing now. And why you always need to both use an archiver site and possibly save a local copy.

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#137
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a Tory (conservative) paper and always has been, traditional or reactionary depending on your point of view. Not sensationalist. The Irish comic Dave Allen characterised the British press as follows: One of the things about Britain, actually: you can always tell the way a person votes by the paper they read. For example, The Times is read by people who run the country. The Financial Times is read by people who o…

Wasn't that in Yes, Minister? Or was it a shorter version... it's been awhile since I saw that show but that's almost the only joke a remember distinctly. Oh, that and the line, "If you want to stab someone in the back you first need to get behind them," which I reference not infrequently.

It was, but it wasn't the original source of that quote.

Someone tried tracking down the source here: http://www.dirtyfeed.org/2021/04/what-the-papers-say/

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#138
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

But half of those people are there with broken legs and apendicitis. Only half of those stats are due to covid. As an invidual, every person in a hospital is too much... but when considering lockdowns, because there are (eg.) a 1000 people with covid in hospitals, it's worth to know if those people are there because of covid, or 560 of them would be there normally.

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#139

There is absolutely zero evidence offered to suggest that the majority of these cases are people with broken legs who test positive. SARS-CoV-2 causes heart attacks and strokes due to thrombogensis, particularly in the younger adults. If someone strokes, they can be admitted for that and then later test positive, and the cause was most likely COVID and counting them is essentially accurate. Since most old people have…

That’s a pretty generous interpretation that offers about as much evidence as the article does for the opposite.
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