Even a stopped clock...
Jan. 5th, 2022 06:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dreamshark ... is right twice a day. And today that stopped clock is the odious Florida Governor DeSantis, who has been saying that the hospitals need to start distinguishing between those hospitalized with COVID and those who "just happen to have it." He is right. COVID hospitalization numbers have been contaminated by this problem since the start of the pandemic. Which might be okay if the percentage of incidental COVID infections among hospitalized patients had been staying steady. The number might be inaccurate but it should remain a good basis of comparison between one wave and the next.
But that is not what is happening. With the Omicron wave there are now so many people with asymptomatic or trivial COVID infections that in hot spots like New York City most of the COVID hospitalizations were not actually hospitalized for COVID. That makes the "number of COVID hospitalizations" a pretty meaningless number. Although it might provide some insight into what percent of the population is already infected with Omicron.
This is actually good news, in a way. It means that Omicron hospitalizations are even lower than the already much diminished numbers being reported.
But that is not what is happening. With the Omicron wave there are now so many people with asymptomatic or trivial COVID infections that in hot spots like New York City most of the COVID hospitalizations were not actually hospitalized for COVID. That makes the "number of COVID hospitalizations" a pretty meaningless number. Although it might provide some insight into what percent of the population is already infected with Omicron.
Dr. Fritz François, chief of hospital operations at NYU Langone Health in New York City, said about 65% of patients admitted to that system with COVID-19 recently were primarily hospitalized for something else and were incidentally found to have the virus.
...
At two large Seattle hospitals over the past two weeks, three-quarters of the 64 patients testing positive for the coronavirus were admitted with a primary diagnosis other than COVID-19.
This is actually good news, in a way. It means that Omicron hospitalizations are even lower than the already much diminished numbers being reported.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-06 07:32 am (UTC)Wow. I hadn't realized this at all; thanks for pointing it out.
I wonder what the percentage is of symptomatic infections that get tested? It seems like half the people I know with possible-Covid systems tested negative (PCR & home testing).
no subject
Date: 2022-01-06 07:07 pm (UTC)PCR tests have the reverse problem - they continue to detect "viral debris" from an infection for sometimes WEEKS after the infection has cleared up. So "testing out of isolation" would be a problematic strategy even if there were enough tests available to make it practical.
As for schools that adopted a "test once after winter break" policy he compares that to buying a house with smoke detectors that only work for one day.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-06 01:55 pm (UTC)I have to wonder how the metric became in-the-hospital + has-covid rather than admitted-for-covid or being-treated-for-covid. And why the same metric has persisted for two years despite being obviously flawed. Is it because the software used to classify patients and report the sums only makes the first number easy to extract? And fixing that requires wading through an unholy swamp of three millions of lines of COBOL, MUMPS and Javascript? It wouldn't shock me.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-06 03:46 pm (UTC)My pretty uninformed guess is that the answer is no, because the data for covid deaths should come from death certificates, and the doctor wouldn't include covid as a cause of death in that case. But I don't know. It could come from some software tracking the state of each patient with covid in a hospital, and if they move from the "hospitalized" state to the "dead" state, they get counted as a covid death.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-06 07:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-06 09:02 pm (UTC)I ask because some people seem to be enamored by the idea that we should wear masks forever, in all social circumstances, to prevent all respiratory diseases. But it seems pretty clear that if you sit in a room with someone with Omicron at a party for 8 hours, you're going to catch it whether or not they're wearing a mask. Maybe not if they are wearing a professionally-fitted N95 or better and they never remove it for any reason, but in reality with the kinds of masks that people actually wear and behaviors that people actually have.
I'm sure not saying that masks are useless. But they seem useless against viruses with R=20, or whatever Omicron has, in party-like situations where you will be in extended contact with a few people. That would apply to schools also. Masks on public transportation and in grocery stores, etc., would still make sense.
(To put it another way, the chance of transmission has to be far away from either 0% or 100% for a mask to help. If the probability is 0%, you obviously don't need one. If it's 99% and a mask doubles the chance of non-transmission, then it's still 98%.)