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Trends in Hospitalizations

By December 13, 2020Commentary

Thanks again to the help from DD on the charts and analysis presented here.  I have been trying to figure out how in the absence of good data from the state, we can better understand what is going on with hospitalizations.  I have believed that increased use of remdesivir, the change to allow observation stays to be paid for, and other financial incentives have played a significant role in the supposed surge of CV-19 hospitalizations.  Case rates of hospitalization have not increased much.  We don’t get length of stay data from the state and we don’t get a lot of daily census information.  One useful thing to look at can be rates of ICU use versus overall use.  If ICU use compared to all use is trending down, it would indicate less serious hospitalizations, consistent with more observation and remdesivir use.  That appears to be the case based on the charts.  You can also see that hospitalizations per case are actually continuing to trend down, I think because expansive testing is just picking up a bunch of non-cases.  And you also see the uptick in the relationship between deaths and ICU use.  It could be that only the most serious cases are going to ICU now.

The other interesting thing to observe is when the peak in hospitalizations occurred, which you can see in the table in the daily situation reports.  This is another confirmatory signal, given the typical lag to hospitalization, that cases had turned around by November 10, before any additional government action.   That action was and is completely unnecessary.  And don’t buy the hysteria that hospital executives are all worried about being strained; they are loving all the CV-19 business they can get, for which they get paid 20% extra.

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  • Ellen says:

    Do you think the vaccines will shed the virus? That’s what the shingles and chickenpox vaccines do; I got shingles in 1995 from a child who had been vaccinated; it’s a variation on the wild virus, so for some reason having chickenpox in the ’60s then being exposed to the chickenpox in our older children earlier in the 1990s did not confer immunity. I was pregnant; the doctor did not know what it was at first because it was quite rare in that age category. CDC took it down, I think, but there was a chart showing 45 degree angle uptick in shingles cases with the introduction of the chickenpox vaccine. SO WILL COVID be shed too ? Is that biological warfare? “WAR”p speed?

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