Coronavirus Hospitalizations Misleading: Roughly Half Not Due to Infection or Severe Illness

The far-left Atlantic, owned by leftist billionaire and widow of Steve Jobs, Laurene Powell Jobs,  admitted in a Monday piece the dramatic reporting on coronavirus hospitalizations may be misleading, given it does not account for the severity of the illness of those hospitalized, nor does it specifically identify if individuals are actually hospitalized for another reason.

Federal health officials have been in overdrive as President Joe Biden has pitted the masses against each other, scolding unvaccinated Americans for refusing to get the shot.

“While the vaccines provide strong protections for the vaccinated, we read about, we hear about, and we see the stories of hospitalized people, people on their death beds, among the unvaccinated over these past few weeks,” Biden said during a speech last week, deeming it the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” and warning that “patience is running thin.”

However, the Atlantic admits the hospitalization number is “losing meaning” as the number of individuals hospitalized with the virus jumps back to the figures seen earlier this year. While the left-wing outlet identified hospitalizations as a “vital metric” for tracking the severity and risk of the illness, it noted a recently released study of hospitalization records that puts a different spin on the figures.

Ultimately, hospitalization numbers do not indicate the severity of the illness. While some patients require intensive care, that is far from the case for all of them who are hospitalized. In fact, some of the individuals are hospitalized for other reasons entirely, only to later discover that they happen to have the coronavirus as well.

Emphasis added:

Some patients need extensive medical intervention, such as getting intubated. Others require supplemental oxygen or administration of the steroid dexamethasone. But there are many COVID patients in the hospital with fairly mild symptoms, too, who have been admitted for further observation on account of their comorbidities, or because they reported feeling short of breath. Another portion of the patients in this tally are in the hospital for something unrelated to COVID, and discovered that they were infected only because they were tested upon admission. How many patients fall into each category has been a topic of much speculation. In August, researchers from Harvard Medical School, Tufts Medical Center, and the Veterans Affairs Healthcare System decided to find out.

“Researchers have tried to get at similar questions before,” the outlet continued, citing another study published in May by California doctors who tried to identify why children who tested positive for the coronavirus were hospitalized. According to the outlet, researchers found 40 to 45 percent were hospitalized for reasons unrelated to the virus. – READ MORE