A new study suggests data for COVID-19 hospitalization may have jumped the gun just a little itty-bitty bit to say the least.
All through the pandemic, the “science” and government types told us that hospitalization metrics were the end all be all of reliable data to measure the seriousness of the pandemic. For CNN it was the metric to blame everything on Donald Trump.
The number of cases is defined by the amount of testing and individuals normally only get tested if they are symptomatic. Deaths are a lagging indicator, which means they confirm trends but they do not predict them.
But a new study that analyzed close to 50,000 COVID hospitalizations across over one hundred Veterans Affairs hospitals appears to undermine the credibility of this concept.
The reason for this is that the COVID data, as it is collected, does not discern the severity of cases for hospitalized patients. In other words, the data doesn’t differentiate between someone with mild symptoms who went to the hospital for something other than COVID and people who had full-blown COVID-19.
The study indicates a substantial number of people who were included in the “hospitalized” data that showed up on COVID dashboards only had mild symptoms, had no symptoms at all, or were admitted for reasons unrelated to COVID, but then tested positive when tested after admission.
But who cares? You should care, because that myth is part of what the Biden administration is weaponizing to force unvaccinated people to get the jab.
The study hasn’t yet been peer reviewed, and that worries me. In the era I call BW (Before Woke), scientific peer review practices were meaningful and provided an important service. The only so-called “science” that saw problems with peer review up until wokeness was climate science that for years ran something more akin to Pal Review than Peer Review, but that’s a story for another day.
AW (After Woke) is when radical leftist government corrupted the science in just about everything. We recently saw the CDC get a peer review website to change the status of a study that was rejected in peer review from “reject” to “revised” the day before the Biden administration wanted to use the study to justify mask mandates.
According to the Atlantic:
The study found that from March 2020 through early January 2021—before vaccination was widespread, and before the Delta variant had arrived—the proportion of patients with mild or asymptomatic disease was 36 percent. From mid-January through the end of June 2021, however, that number rose to 48 percent. In other words, the study suggests that 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 increase was even bigger for vaccinated hospital patients, of whom 57 percent had mild or asymptomatic disease. But unvaccinated patients have also been showing up with less severe symptoms, on average, than earlier in the pandemic: The study found that 45 percent of their cases were mild or asymptomatic since January 21.
…One of the important implications of the study, these experts say, is that the introduction of vaccines strongly correlates with a greater share of COVID hospital patients having mild or asymptomatic disease. “It’s underreported how well the vaccine makes your life better, how much less sick you are likely to be, and less sick even if hospitalized,” Snyder said. “That’s the gem in this study.”
Full disclosure, there are some snags in the study according to the Atlantic’s piece. For one thing, the study has a large sample size, but there are no children and few women among the samples. The VA has a policy to test every patient for COVID. Most of the data analyzed in the study was collected pre Delta caser spike.
According to Daniel Griffin, an infectious disease specialist at Columbia University, the most important thing realized by the results of the study is the efficacy (effectiveness) of the COVID vaccines.
“People ask me, ‘Why am I getting vaccinated if I just end up in the hospital, anyway?'” Griffin said. “But I say, ‘You’ll end up leaving the hospital.'”
Personally, I believe hospitals wanted to get the numbers high for COVID cases. They had a monetary incentive to do so as the government gave out money for each COVID patient supposedly to cover the cost of the extra PPE that had to be used. We read stories of people dying from a car accident listed as a COVID death, and people who died in hospitals listed as a COVID death, but they didn’t have COVID and were never even tested for COVID. On the political side of things, the Democrats wanted the numbers as high as possible because they were going to use it as a weapon against Donald Trump in the 2020 election.
Then we recently discovered that the CDC quietly revoked RT-PCR test Emergency Use Authorization because it combined COVID-19 and Influenza. In other words, they knew all along that the test could not distinguish between COVID and the Flu. They just wanted the numbers up to get rid of Trump.
This is why millions of Americans no longer trust the science because it’s been so corrupted by radical leftists who have weaponized science to push their agendas.
Rich is a conservative, syndicated opinion writer and owner of MAGA-Chat.com. He writes about politics, culture, liberty, and faith.
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