A new study (pending peer review) collected by The Atlantic, from all places, puts into perspective the recent fear about the number of Americans hospitalized with Wuhan coronavirus. Most notable is the study by a team of researchers at Harvard Medical School, Tufts Medical Center and the Veterans Affairs Healthcare System, which found that many of those “hospitalized with COVID” are not the published bad situations. by the liberal media and the major Democrats.
The leading researchers who took the narratives to the point: “Approximately half of all hospitalized patients appearing on COVID data boards in 2021 may have been admitted for another reason or have had only a mild presentation of the disease “.
A new study suggests that nearly half of those hospitalized with COVID-19 have mild or asymptomatic cases, @davidzweig reports. https://t.co/OOd1ddMFiU
– The Atlantic (@TheAtlantic) September 13, 2021
Instead of the overwhelming horror stories of normally healthy individuals coming in with COVID, who are soon intubated and put on a ventilator before their body finally succumbs to the virus, there are a lot of people (in fact, almost half ) hospitals * with * COVID, but not necessarily * because of * COVID or at risk of dying from the virus. Yes, these tragic situations still happen, but it happens less often than many seem to want Americans to think.
Instead of each “COVID hospitalization” being a death or life situation that requires a drastic reaction, the figures can come from a variety of scenarios. Maybe someone is receiving treatment for cancer and, when admitted, tests positive for COVID, but remains asymptomatic, for example. Also included are psychiatric admissions that have nothing to do with COVID.
The following explains how its researchers arrived after analyzing electronic hospital records of approximately 50,000 COVID hospital admissions to more than 100 VA hospitals nationwide:
They checked whether each patient needed supplemental oxygen or had a blood oxygen level below 94%. (The latter criterion is based on the National Institutes of Health’s definition of “severe COVID”). If any of these conditions are met, the authors classify that patient as a moderate to severe disease; otherwise, the case was considered mild or asymptomatic.
And, for patients vaccinated against Wuhan coronavirus, the percentage of hospitalizations for COVID for those with mild or asymptomatic cases increased to 57%. But another panic finding from the study: “Unvaccinated patients have also appeared with less severe symptoms, on average, than before the pandemic: the study found that 45 percent of their cases were mild or asymptomatic since January 21. “This positive development, according to one of the study’s co-authors, is because patients are younger and more likely to have had COVID before.
The study has its limitations, such as the VA system against adult male patients and the practice throughout the VA system of testing COVID in all patients, which is not universal in other health systems. But, as even The Atlantic points out, “the study also shows that COVID hospitalization rates, as cited by journalists and policymakers, can be misleading, if not considered carefully.”
Thus, while the liberal echo chambers of cable news, Twitter and the political left tell us that hospitalizations are increasing (usually, they claim, because of Republican governors who prefer their citizens to choose for themselves how they want to protect and their families) and, consequently, we must hand over all control and autonomy to the great “G” government, it is not necessarily the case if the conclusions of these researchers are validated by a peer review and similar studies in the future.