We've been using admissions to hospitals with a Covid-19 diagnosis as an indicator of how bad the disease is in a particular region at a point in time. The Atlantic reports a study that shows the metric may be misleading.
It turns out that everyone admitted to a hospital these days is tested for Covid-19, a sensible precaution. Regardless of the complaint which brought them to the hospital, they are listed as Covid patients if the test is positive. Looking at admissions of some 50,000 patients to Veterans' Administration hospitals:
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.
Show up with a heart issue, a burn, or a broken leg, if you also have Covid you are counted among the sick with that disease, even though you present few or none of its symptoms. I believe we need to get data for "why people are admitted" rather than whether they subsequently show a positive test result.
