‘COVID-19 Hospitalizations’ Are an Increasingly Misleading Measure of Severe Disease

And the death tolls like in the United States are significantly inflated! That did not prevent businesses like Walmart to fly the U.S. flag at half staff this weekend!

"... A newly published preprint study addresses those gaps in knowledge by applying measures of disease severity to about 48,000 V.A. hospital admissions of more than 38,000 COVID-positive patients between March 1, 2020, and June 30, 2021. The researchers, all but one of whom work for the V.A. Boston Healthcare System, found that the share of admissions involving moderate-to-severe COVID-19 cases fell from 64 percent before vaccines were widely available to 52 percent afterward.
In other words, incidental or mild cases accounted for a rising share of so-called COVID-19 hospitalizations—nearly half by the end of June. ..."

"... Conclusions and Relevance: The proportion of hospitalizations that are due to severe COVID-19 has changed with vaccine availability, thus, increasing proportions of mild and asymptomatic cases are included in hospitalization reporting metrics. The addition of simple measures of disease severity to the case definition of a SARS-CoV-2 hospitalization is a straightforward and objective change that should improve the value of the metric for tracking SARS-CoV-2 disease burden."

‘COVID-19 Hospitalizations’ Are an Increasingly Misleading Measure of Severe Disease – Reason.com New research shows incidental and mild infections account for a large and rising share of that widely cited number.

The COVID-19 Hospitalization Metric in the Pre- and Post-vaccination Eras as a Measure of Pandemic Severity: A Retrospective, Nationwide Cohort Study (open access)