> The fact that more people are in the hospital in Florida right now than at any time in the last two years
THIS IS NOT TRUE.
The metric you are describing is hospital census, which is _not_ at an all-time high right now.
What is at an all time high? The percentage of people in the hospital who have tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, regardless of their presentation.
The roundtable just yesterday confirmed that there are hospitals which have near 100% positivity, despite 80% presenting for things unrelated to a respiratory infection.
Some people are there for blunt trauma or routine surgery, but have tested positive for SARS-CoV-2.
I just don't understand the point of constantly misrepresenting this metric. It muddies the waters of actual concerns about the spread of the virus by making it seem like those are are concerned are dishonest.
> I just don't understand the point of constantly misrepresenting this metric. It muddies the waters of actual concerns about the spread of the virus by making it seem like those are are concerned are dishonest.
> Stop it.
That must be this "projection" I keep hearing about.
I noticed the hospitalizations graph on my favorite source for Texas (Texas tribune) now reads “Total current patients with COVID-19 in hospitals”. That’s deceitful in my eyes because that includes anyone in the hospital for any reason who tests positive and not people only hospitalized because of Covid-19 which is what you’re expecting.
Also, the whole ICU capacity percentage numbers inducing so much fear and panic are very misleading. ICU capacity isn’t static it can be adjusted up and down. So saying ICU is at 98% capacity utilization is meaningless because it could be very well possible that ICU beds can be added and now ICU capacity is 75% utilization.
> 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.
Well, about that. A few governors have admitted what has been known by “conspiracy theorists” for the past two years: that included in the count of Covid hospitalizations are people who come to the hospital for something else entirely and happen to test positive [0]:
> Officials from New York City-based NYU Langone Health told The New York Times in a Jan. 4 report that about 65 percent of its COVID-19 patients were "incidentally" found to be infected after admission for other reasons. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul asked hospitals to adjust their reporting on COVID-19 hospitalizations beginning Jan. 4 to make the distinction between those admitted for the virus as their primary condition and those who incidentally test positive.
...
> "We have a few patients in the hospital for COVID, but not many, thank goodness," Dr. Jha tweeted. "More common on our service is folks admitted with COVID. That is, they came to the hospital for something else and found to have COVID."
So the count numbers have been exaggerated for who knows how long. An accident, I’m sure.
> In the last 24 hours 40 more people were hospitalised with covid-19
Without context this doesn't sound super alarming. In a country of 10 Million, at ostensibly the peak of a wave of infection, 40 people per day are hospitalized. How does that differ from seasonal flu? Or from regular variations in hospitalization? It sounds like it could be a rounding error...
I stated that lazily. If we counted hospitilizations (which I would argue is the number that matters), then they would tell you that those are overcounted because many people go into the hospital with COVID, but that's not what they are there for and many more contract it while there. But the number makes it sound like all those folks are in the hospital BECAUSE of COVID.
> ... roughly half of all the hospitalized patients showing up on COVID-data dashboards in 2021 may have been admitted for another reason entirely, or had only a mild presentation of disease ... this study suggests that COVID hospitalization tallies can’t be taken as a simple measure of the prevalence of severe or even moderate disease, because they might inflate the true numbers by a factor of two ... referring to decisions about school closures, business restrictions, mask requirements, and so on, “we should refine the definition of hospitalization. Those patients who are there with rather than from COVID don’t belong in the metric.”
> Isn’t “percentage of occupied beds w/ covid” a terrible metric?
It's not perfect, but in terms of the readily available data, it's not terrible.
> As states open up and elective surgeries, car accidents etc increase the denominator will inevitably increase
OTOH, there's a credible argument that that is a kind of positive progress itself. And, no, it's not inevitable that the denominator will go up if COVID already has hospitals at capacity.
> What is wrong with the much simpler metric of “number of beds used by covid patients”?
That's a good measure for any state, but bad for comparing conditions among states. Share of available hospital beds occupied by COVID-19 patients might be better, but “available” is not always clear since physical capacity and staffing and other support may not yield the same maximum. Because of required staffing ratios, etc.
The first line of the article is "The number of Covid patients in Florida hospitals has risen to a new high, breaking records set during previous waves before vaccines were available."
Then, there's a quote to that effect from a doctor, specific to their hospital.
You didn't read the article, did you now? The numbers say - according to the article itself - that of the patients hospitalized and diagnosed with Covid 44% had a positive test before being admitted - 43% had a positive test within 2 days and the remaining 13% tested positive within 2 weeks [they don't mention the distribution].
What I find repulsive about this article is that they never say 'someone with a broken leg was counted as a Covid case after the mandatory testing' - they just dance around it, make innuendos and let third parties dance closer to it.
Nowhere in the article they state 'asymptomatic cases with an other unrelated diagnosis were counted as Covid cases' - and I am guessing they don't because the don't have the numbers to prove it.
A real journalist would track down the cases - would try and find the 'I went in with a broken leg and was released with a Covid diagnosis', get the discharging papers and write about it.
Now: if there were really so many cases of people hospitalized with a different diagnosis and attributed to Covid to 'jack up the numbers' - where are they? Where are the articles about it?
Until you have these, please: go back to your little green field to play with your friends - the adults are trying to have a conversation here.
> The graph here you are looking for is the one that shows the percentage of staffed beds and icu beds occupied. Notice that it is entirely flat.
Compare June to September, total staffed beds is about even, total ICU beds grew somewhat, and usage of both jumped from about 80% to 88% for overall beds, and 90ish to 96% for ICUs (which is a bigger increase in use than it might seem because capacity increased)
If overall use increased 10% and covid users are 20% of overall and 40% of ICU, up from maybe 5% and 10%, it seems there are a lot of non-covid users whose care is being delayed or denied because of covid. There's some room for misleading statistical information, such as ICU patients in for something else that happen to have asymptomatic covid and are only tested because of other patients, but the difference in stats seems large enough to ignore that. Stats I've heard are that the vast majority of hospitalized covid patients in most states had not been vacinated, so it does seem useful to the person taking them, and by reducing the overall hospitalization rate, seem to have kept Texas within hospital capacity, if barely (I haven't heard stories of Texas hospitals running triage and tents in parking garage like some other states)
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.
> but I don't get why (from what I've seen) hospitalizations don't seem to be all that important when reporting on COVID numbers in general.
To an extent, by the time the hospital numbers are going up sharply, it's too late, and the hospitals will inevitably be overwhelmed, so it's not a good guide of policy. New case count is the only vaguely timely indicator we have.
And according to [1] 125,117 patients were admitted to hospital based on 290,133 positive tests. So about 43% of UK people who test positive are being hospitalized. So that's really bad.
Do you have a source for this? The math doesn’t add up (vaccinated are 10-15x less likely to be hospitalized, and around 60% of US is vaccinated, implies around 6/46 hospitalized people are vaccinated) and all the sources I could find show that unvaccinated people take up most hospitalizations and even more ICU beds, which is the limiting resource.
Sorry, I just don't believe these numbers. Even mainstream media sources have begun admitting that hospital admission rates are meaningless because they reflect mostly test results from hospital admissions for concerns other than covid symptoms. It is interesting that despite this the unvaccinated are showing up more, but because it is for example plausible that the unvaccinated are just plain leaving their homes more, I think that actual scientific study is needed to explain these numbers.
I recognize that it's ridiculous to be in a situation where I'm rejecting facts; that's a great way to be led completely astray. But that's the world that censorship has created.
Right. As are the case numbers reported on the news and elsewhere.
I'm quoting myself to make the point there; that statement is accurate, but it doesn't tell the whole story. see the reports like [1] that expand on how the other numbers also have been taken to mean more than they perhaps should.
> The fact that more people are in the hospital in Florida right now than at any time in the last two years
THIS IS NOT TRUE.
The metric you are describing is hospital census, which is _not_ at an all-time high right now.
What is at an all time high? The percentage of people in the hospital who have tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, regardless of their presentation.
The roundtable just yesterday confirmed that there are hospitals which have near 100% positivity, despite 80% presenting for things unrelated to a respiratory infection.
Some people are there for blunt trauma or routine surgery, but have tested positive for SARS-CoV-2.
I just don't understand the point of constantly misrepresenting this metric. It muddies the waters of actual concerns about the spread of the virus by making it seem like those are are concerned are dishonest.
Stop it.
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