From almost the very beginning of the pandemic, there has been a tacit understanding that the data collected on COVID, its prevalence, and its spread are somewhat less than ideal. Specifically, data regarding new infections are highly misleading. This goes double for a milder but more infectious variant, such as omicron, running wild.
More to the point, data about hospitalizations are similarly misleading because they count every infected person who happens to be in a hospital as a COVID hospitalization. This is true even in cases where people were hospitalized for completely unrelated ailments — the flu, heart attacks, broken legs, gunshot wounds, and the rest. If they happen to have the coronavirus, they are considered COVID hospitalizations. That never made any sense.
At long last, the Biden administration is finally attempting to change the way hospitalizations due to COVID are counted. This is very good news, and quite long overdue, even if President Joe Biden is only doing it to make his administration look less bad in its abysmal handling of the coronavirus.
The current system is deficient, as evinced by the distorted results it has generated. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently cited the experience of a California hospital in pointing out that 80% of its patients were supposedly admitted for COVID. This is, of course, absurd — a statistical artifact based on the fact that the reigning omicron variant of COVID is extremely contagious but not very dangerous. Anyone who has the virus is counted as a COVID case — therefore, almost everyone in a hospital counts as being hospitalized with COVID.
This reinforces the idea that hospitalization data need to be recalculated. But the fact is that they should have been calculated differently from the beginning. It would have helped cut down on all the counterproductive pandemic panic in which the media has delighted.
If there is an interest in tracking how badly the nation is afflicted with the coronavirus, the true measure is not how many people get it but how many people experience severe cases.
It will take some time for researchers to go through patient files and separate out the cases of people hospitalized due to the coronavirus as opposed to those merely hospitalized with the coronavirus. However, there are other ways of looking at this problem. For one thing, all-cause mortality provides a consistent statistic that can be compared across the years. It is also possible that the total hospitalized population can be compared to the pre-pandemic years in an effort to measure the effects of the pandemic on the hospital system.
In the end, Biden’s political instincts are leading him to do something that probably should have been done two years ago. Two cheers for that — or perhaps just one and a half. If only Biden would be this practical about other things, such as the need to end lockdown policies now that their ineffectiveness has been definitively established.
