Live data from Hacker News

Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

telegraph.co.uk

141–150 of 241 posts

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

How is this not proof of exaggeration? Somebody in the hospital for a broken leg being counted as a "Covid hospitalization" just because they also happened to test positive for Covid means that the numbers are inflated. Period. Covid is real. Covid numbers are inflated. You're arguing against a fictional "Covid denier" boogeyman which doesn't really exist.

Regardless of why they were admitted they still had covid.

You’re trying to answer what sent someone to hospital, not who has covid.

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#142
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me this is interesting, but not really material to anything. Sure, the tests we have for this new virus have needed to be adjusted and calibrated as we learn more about it. It's unfortunate if the numbers are a bit messed up, it would be better if they were more accurate, but real life is messy. I don't think you're a kook, and I can only guess what those people were thinking. Maybe they just wondered... and ther…

Abusing high cycle thresholds for false positives isn't a new strategy. PCR inventor Kary Mullis is on video calling Fauci out for doing exactly that. Unfortunately I can't even link the two videos because they keep getting memory holed. If you search around you might get lucky, otherwise I'll upload my saved copy when I get off work.

Note that the background for this is that Kary Mullis believed AIDS wasn’t caused by HIV and was therefore angry at Fauci and the entire medical/scientific establishment for linking HIV and AIDS. He died in 2019 so his criticisms of Fauci were related to HIV, not SARS-CoV-2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis#Views_on_HIV/AIDS_...

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#143
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's harder to dismiss when you also consider the first vaccine approvals kept getting delayed until they were released immediately after the election.

Note that it was hardly “delayed” since all initial predictions for the vaccine to be approved were around 12 months, in the end it only took about 10 months.

Reports last year indicated Trump’s own FDA was responsible for setting out the needed time for data gathering and review that pushed it into mid-November. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/white-house-okays-fda-months...

Meanwhile other countries including China and Russia didn’t approve their own vaccines faster, seeming to indicate the timeline had little to do with U.S. politics.

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#144
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…

That isn't a valid reason. The infection fatality rate for most people who keep the Internet running is way less than 1%.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Rather than speculate why didn’t you just do a google search? A quick google and check of archive.org finds the document released in December with an archive date of dec 16.

https://web.archive.org/web/20201216033740/https://www.news-...

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#146
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>The only metric the public should be concerned about is whether they have or have not been vaccinated. That would be quite stupid. Because if the risk of the disease is low, vaccines does not make sense when you do risk/benefit calculation. Hence the people should know about the cases. Of course, instead, if you are looking to push vaccines no matter what, you would say something like >The only metric the public sho…

Regardless of number of cases, most of us will be exposed to SARS-CoV-2 eventually. Just like with other endemic coronaviruses such as HCoV-OC43.

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#147
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…

> red death map visualizations for people to see with inflated death counts.

There is no indication of inflated death counts. Death counts from covid correlate closely with excess deaths.

Some have claimed that deaths did rise but because of lockdowns, however in “locked down” regions where reported Covid cases and deaths were low, so were excess deaths.

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#148
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…

In Santa Clara County COVID-19 deaths were originally over counted by 22% before they adjusted the methodology. Other public health agencies have had similar data quality problems. So not half, but a significant fraction.

https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2021/07/02/santa-clara-cou...

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#149
post #26

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

The CDC estimates that only about a quarter of infections are officially counted as cases.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#150

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…

Keep in mind: efficient and organized or not, the government check keeps coming. What are the incentives to improve then?

[deleted]
Post reply on HN