Red Mosquito

tragabigzanda wrote:Having Covid land in my house is the best thing to ever happen to me. Now I don’t have to try to keep up with the guidelines and McP’s of the world (no offense) for at least a few months.

tragabigzanda wrote:

McParadigm wrote:I don’t even know what you mean by it.

I just mean that you’re both well informed and have good intentions and a reasonable approach to trying to get people to see this situation the way you see it. Which I wish more people did.

But I’m so worn out by this that I don’t even want to hear from the informed and reasonable anymore. I’m effectively looking at my household’s positive diagnosis as a mandate to stop paying attention to recommendations for a bit. Obviously I’ll continue to be prudent, but fuck if I can keep up with the CDC vs County vs my employer vs my kid’s daycare shifting rules and suggested guidance.

Everyone fuck off, we finally got Covid, leave me alone for a bit.

spike wrote:

tragabigzanda wrote:

McParadigm wrote:I don’t even know what you mean by it.

I just mean that you’re both well informed and have good intentions and a reasonable approach to trying to get people to see this situation the way you see it. Which I wish more people did.

But I’m so worn out by this that I don’t even want to hear from the informed and reasonable anymore. I’m effectively looking at my household’s positive diagnosis as a mandate to stop paying attention to recommendations for a bit. Obviously I’ll continue to be prudent, but fuck if I can keep up with the CDC vs County vs my employer vs my kid’s daycare shifting rules and suggested guidance.

Everyone fuck off, we finally got Covid, leave me alone for a bit.

At least you got this far, man. Plenty of folks had covid break their brains ages ago.

Bammer wrote:Welcome to the party, trag!

We should really start tracking arrival dates/times.

Bammer wrote:I’m at the Husky basketball game right now and it’s funny how as the game goes on, more people remove their masks

Yeah the arena was more contagious during the first half, and it’s ok now

McParadigm wrote:

4/5 wrote:

McParadigm wrote: When a hospital says “40% of our current COVID cases are people who came in for something else,” they are saying that COVID is so prevalent that it is now routinely acquired in the hospital system. They are not saying that those people count towards their “hospitalized with COVID” numbers.

The only circumstances under which those patients could be counted in that category is if they became so ill from that hospital-acquired COVID that a new admission occurred….in other words, if I come in for a heart attack and, during my care, I become so sick with COVID that I warrant an ongoing inpatient treatment of care for that. This is a new encounter, with a new MRN, and it would be reported out.

If I came in with a heart attack, got COVID, and that illness slowed my recovery from the heart attack but was mostly treatable with a few medications, etc…if my COVID care needs alone would not have been sufficient to put me in the hospital were I not already there…it does not.

You may be right about all of this, I don't know. I know that's not the impression I get from articles and quotes I've read recently. Each of these is within the last week. Maybe I'm misunderstanding, though.

Spoiler: show

From NBC:

According to an NBC News analysis, at least nine states have reported record numbers of Covid-related pediatric hospitalizations: Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Maine, Missouri, Ohio and Pennsylvania, as well as Washington, D.C.

Some of those children were found to be Covid-positive through routine testing if they had to be hospitalized for other, unrelated issues. But many have been hospitalized specifically because of complications from Covid-19.

From CNN

The HHS data on Covid-19 hospitalizations includes both those patients who are hospitalized because of Covid-19 complications and those who may have been admitted for something else but test positive for Covid-19. This has been true throughout the pandemic, though the share of patients who fall into each category may have changed over time.

From WSJ:

The data don’t distinguish between people hospitalized for Covid-19, and those who are hospitalized for other reasons but test positive for the virus.

The high amount of Omicron circulating in communities is contributing to the number of people testing positive after routine screening, doctors say. It may also be a factor in the seriousness of their conditions.

Among a near-record 514 Covid-19 patients in the Jackson Health System’s Miami-area hospitals Monday, for example, an estimated 54% were admitted mainly for non-Covid-19 reasons, the system said.

Exemptions exist because of course they do, and I'm sure it's true that their small subset of data cannot realistically be decoupled from the broad data once delivered. So qualifier statements like "some of these people are testing positive but are admitted for other reasons..." are journalistically appropriate. Some of the people in this data set do factually represent a recognizable type of outlier.

But I'm not arguing that the data is exact. I'm arguing that a set of standards is broadly adhered to, and is consistent enough (especially among larger institutions) that you cannot extrapolate a minority of outliers into "maybe they represent a vast inflation of hospitalization numbers."

For demonstration, consider Austin, Texas.

Austin currently reports that some 30-40% of patients admitted for other causes are testing positive for COVID. As of yesterday, Austin area has 3,379 current inpatient admissions, so 30% of that would be 1,125 patients testing positive for COVID. 40% would be over 1,300.

They are currently reporting 539 COVID hospitalizations. Because they are reporting people who require inpatient-level hospital care for COVID-based symptoms. Not every single patient who happens to test positive.